So if the feds show up at your door tomorrow and haul you away with ZERO accountability (no charge, no attorney, no trial), you're ok with that too? Or are you just totally certain that bad things only ever happen to bad people as long as you wave your flag hard enough?
The post you responded to noted that I'm against the vast majority of what has been done in the wake of 9/11. Anyone in the US swept up as part of an anti-terror operation should most certainly have their right to a fair and speedy trial respected (or to a cout martial, depending on their status and alledged crimes.)
Christ, look at how many mistakes, lies, and abuses have been sent our way in the WoT, and you still happily take their word for it when they say, "It was a bad website run by bad men. Move along, nothing to see here."
Hold on there, sparky--I take anything said by the US (or in this case, british) government with a large grain of salt. However, "they" sure as hell aren't the ones I'm believing here. I'm taking the press report at face value, yes, until information to the contrary appears. Let's look at this rationally:
There are websites run by and for al-Qaeda for the purposes of communications and the spread of propaganda. I don't believe we need to debate this point, but feel free to offer opinion otherwise.
When identified, we can either use these websites as intelligence gathering tools, or shut them down. In this case, it appears the latter course of action was chosen.
Look, I consider myself to be a rabid supporter of civil liberties, but there's a point when you need to accept that something isn't a civil liberties issue, even though it technically meets the definition of "free speech." To use an analogy, it would be like suggesting that a communications tower set up during ww2 for the purpose of vectoring bombers counted as part of a "free press" or that armed foreign soldiers on US soil had a 2nd amendment right to bear those arms. The idea of either of the above being protected rights is absurd on its face--and as I noted elsewhere in this thread, if a mistake has in fact been made, the site owner can step forward and press his/her free speech/press case to the appropriate court--and I, for one, would strongly support their right to do just that.
It doesn't bother you at all that sites are being shut down with basically ZERO accountability and no meaningful description as to what's getting them shut down?
Quite honestly, no, I don't. While I am opposed, in general, to the general sillieness that has resulted from "The War on Terra" (i.e. PATRIOT act, billions spent on absurd airport security measures, the Iraq war, etc) I do accept that the fight against al-Qaeda is a war, albiet one with rather nebulously defined fronts, and very limited objectives for our side other than "keep them from blowing our shit up."
The websites in question were, from the descriptions in the article, communications systems being used by the bad guys. This makes them legitimate military targets. If, in fact, this story is all smoke and mirrors, the website owners can certainly come forward and attempt to press their freedom of speech and/or the press cases (I'm not a Britton, so I don't know how this sort of thing works over there. Presumably, though, citizens--sorry, subjects--have some sort of recourse when their speech is shat upon by the powers that be.)
Or maybe none of what you just said is true at all.
Indeed, this is quite possible.
You're ranting about conspiriacy theorists, and here you are, making shit up. I highly doubt you have a single shred of evidence to back any of that up.
You might not understand this, but in general when someone says "maybe this thing, or maybe this other thing" they are engaged in a process known as "speculation."
My whole point is this doesn't look like a real victory at all. It's probably bad because we're loosing sources of information, and we might be shutting down sites that we shouldn't be.
And this, of course, goes to the heart of why my speculation is far more likely than your "we are teh sux0rs!" ranting. Do you really think that our intelligence arms (and by "our" in this case, I mean "western intelligence assets engaged in tracking al-Qaeda") don't understand that reading the other guy's mail is a good thing? They have admittedly made mistakes in the past, but do you really expect agencies whose heritage includes the Magic and Ultra programs to not grasp this idea?
Somehow, it think if we actually had PROOF, we wouldn't be shutting down sites at all, but monitoring them in order to track down ACTUAL PEOPLE.
Maybe this has already been done, and its intelligence gathering value is now outweighed by its usefulness to the bad guys. Or maybe the nature of the resource makes tracking the people who are talking problematic at best.
Unless, of course, you don't actually HAVE any information to back up your claims. So yeah, let's all have a big hurrah for this PR bullshit
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA. The British government isn't making some nebulous claims about terrorism--a newspaper is making the claim that:
there were various websites affiliated with al-Qaeda,
lots of them have gone dark, and
all the information on the matter they've come up with points at the british government as the reason for item 2.
It never ceases to amaze me the conclusions people jump to, despite having no evidence of their conspiracy theories, and having access to information contrary to the idiocy they're spouting. For a good example, see all the "goddamn republicans!" posts in the "porn taxing" story further down the page. The tax in question is being pushed by a democrat, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone.
How do you kill someone with a web site? Or is that classified?
I can't tell you who originally said this, but I agree whole heartedly, and I believe it answers your question quite well: "The most dangerous weapon in the world is a set of trained eyes and a radio."
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
However, Microsoft will not release Windows as Open Source. They cannot, because there is too much stolen code in it. **cough**BSD**cough**
Given that the infamous "running strings on ftp.exe" results in the Berkeley Regents copyright notice, I daresay that this code is NOT stolen, and is being used according to license.
No, the real reason this will never happen is that there isn't anything in it for MS--interoperability weakens their monopoly, and Open Source doesn't offer anything compelling enough (to them) to make that kind of move. However, I think we will see more and more dev and system administration tools end up under some form of F/OSS license. They already have a few projects in the wild (two of them are actually hosted on sourceforge!)
That actually has a real benefit to microsoft--particularly if Balmer was serious when he did his monkey dance and shouted "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" The CPL seems to be what they're currently looking at for that sort of thing, let's see how they progress.
Now it's an 18+ they'll sell twice as many copies!
Maybe, maybe not. The AO sticker means that Wal-Mart will pull it from the shelves, which is definitely going to be a negative as far as sales go. The question is "will sales generated by other retailers make up for losing wal-mart?"
Also, how many vipers can they lose from week to week before they start having a major resource issue?
This is actually taken into account by the show. If you read the blog/listen to the podcasts, they mention that there are n many ships available, and no replacements magically appear. At some point, they will have to find a way to replenish them.
A floppy drive is a device to store a real-mode operating system and a BIOS update program. What other device is compatible with the self-extracting-to-floppy-disk BIOS update programs that BIOS publishers distribute?
A keychain drive, when the system supports booting from a USB device?
I guess it's similar to the way Bush convinced 51% of America to vote for him even after such acts like the Patriot Act
Both major candidates have the exact same record on the PATRIOT act--Kerry voted for it, Bush signed it. That makes both of them asshats in my book, and neither one comes out the better.
... besides speedier search and better eye candies?
Because Microsoft will stop supplying security patches, just like they did with NT4. Unless you continue to walk on the upgrade treadmill (or switch to an alternative OS--which is often not possible) it will eventually become impossible to secure your systems. That'll be $299, please.
I'm not a violent person, and I agree with you that the correct way to handle a problem is via the framework we have established to do so (in other words, the courts.) However, we have a legal system, and not a justice system. Sometimes (some would say often, but I won't) it fails. Now what?
Google for "Ken Rex McElroy" and tell me vigilante justice is never justified.
I just knew this topic would generate another GPL vs. BSD argument
I can't help but wonder if you replied to the wrong post? Personally, I see the merits of both BSD and GPL licensing. While I personally prefer the GPL because it forces the code to remain free, I wouldn't presume to tell somebody they had to use it because it was MY preference.
GPL, BSD, CPL, Apache, Public Domain, whatever you want to license your code under--hey, it's YOUR code, right?
I'm going to assume you're smarter than that and mean these two specific incidents.
While these two specific incidents are rather good examples of the point I was trying to get across, no, I do mean in general--it's not a universal attitude, but it happens enough to be the rule rather than the exception.
Case in point, the problems in western Africa (Liberia, etc) a couple of years ago. I read quite a few snide remarks in the international press that America should be intervening, but can't because of being locked in the Iraq war.
So yes, not taking steps to stop a slaughter when you can is vile. And starting a war on the basis of fabricated evidence and outright lies?
Allow me to state for the record that I was opposed to the Iraq war (but think that we must do the responsible thing and clean up the mess made by the current administration.) That said, your position about not taking steps to stop a slaughter CAN be applied to Iraq.
Not that I, personally, would--I don't think the US should be the world's polceman.
Don't blame UN when you own government didn't do shit.
i.e. when the US acts without the backing of the UN, we're the big, evil bully. However, when the US DOESN'T act when the UN is disinterested, we're the big, evil, unfeeling nation who could care less about the plight of the rest of the world. Right?
The GPL, accessible guilt-free wide-spread piracy, and socialism are all related in that they remove the valuation of a product or service.
I disagree with you. More importantly (and far more influentually) the market disagrees with you. Ask IBM, HP, Intel, SGI, Disney, Pixar, Google--I could go on, but I won't--how much value GPL software has. Seems to me that the value of the Linux kernel alone is measured in billions--if not tens or even hundreds of billions--of dollars.
Beyond that, the comparison of GPL code to socialism (a comparison designed to equate the GPL with an idea many consider to be evil) is that the GPL is entirely opt-in. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a socialist or communist nation will find that the products of their labor are forcibly taken and given to others "more deserving" or who "need it more" with the alternative being prison or death. On the other hand, engaging in the development of--or using--software licensed under the GPL is entirely voluntary. RMS is not going to come to your house wearing jackboots and demand you use GCC.
Let's not beat around the bush--companies and individuals HAVE been screwed by productizing GPL software and finding either someone else doing the same, or getting threatening letters from the copyright owners demanding source code. To this, I say: they COULD have elected to develop from scratch, but instead opted to use someone else's work. Exactly why would a rational person expect to be able to take someone else's labor and profit from it without remuneration? THAT sounds more like a socialist state to me, while the GPL's quid-pro-quo sounds quite capitalist in comparison.
I agree--I am aware, peripherally, that tools like that are out there, I just haven't worked with any of them. Your solution is definitely more reliable and more scalable than mine, but I didn't want to spout off about something I wasn't familiar with.
OTOH, using an RS232 link to determine if something on the other end is alive is something I've done before and could actually decribe without researching.:)
Whenever I see people make this assertion, a little cold chill runs up my spine.
You have to admit, the point is valid--MY blood runs cold whenever I hear someone say "well, the consitution doesn't say anything about $ACTIVITY, so you don't have a RIGHT to do it." We've gone from a climate where a "for example" list of enumerated rights has turned into one where those rights, if not the ONLY ones allowed to you (though getting closer by the day) are certainly given more far weight than others simply because they were mentioned, the 9th amendment be damned.
If this had not been spelled out as a right in the constitution, then these rights would be decided on the state level.
Ah ha, so we reach the crux of why you get shivers down your spine. I don't suppose it would help you to know that the constitution as written DID NOT have any effect on laws at the state level? It wasn't till the post-civil war 14th amendment in 1868 (or, more accurately, until 1897 and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad v. Chicago) that the Bill of Rights began to be applied to the states.
Can you imagine the hodgepodge of laws that we would have had without having a freedom of speech and freedom of religion clauses written into the constitution? Local states and municipalities would have been free to do just that, unchecked.
To dredge up a rather infamous quote in regard to software: it's not a bug, it's a feature. Our system of government was designed with this sort of thing in mind. The idea that someone in Boston should tell someone in Virginia how to go about public and private business (and vice versa) was something the founders were trying to avoid.
(Granted, many did anyhow, but over time the worst of them were abolished because of rulings from the courts)
Err, so what? It's a big country... if your locality does things in ways you don't like, go elsewhere. If you don't like ultra-conservative Utah, ultra-liberal bay area of northern California might just be the place for you.
I do agree with you, to a point. I, too, find it intolerable that basic liberties should be denied anyone. I further agree that at very local levels, this is quite possible and even likely (for a good example, see how alot of HOAs operate.) On the other hand, the situation we have today--where 9 people get to decide questions that impact every section of commerce and government, get to redefine what basic liberties actually mean in direct opposition to what they've meant for centuries, interfere with the election process of one of the "several states" (i.e. Florida, 2000, brought to you courtesy of the 14th amendment), and have these decisions affect all 50 states and 280,000,000 people--is just as bad as the situation you describe, albiet in a different way.
If you put a pentium I computer with a 2 gig hd or something up in front of an entire lab for internet access, I would wonder about the reliability. What I mean is, at work here I was doing something similar - but when the non-rendundant power supply in the 1995 based computer died, my entire part of the office lost net access, which is bad.
So have a pair of them set up in a failover configuration. Connect them with your method of choice (RS232 works), and have the secondary machine periodically poll the primary. If the primary is down, the secondary picks up its IP as an alias. When the RS232 link comes back up, the secondary releases the IP. As an added bonus, you could have half of your machines pointing at each one, and use them for load balancing as well.
The code to do all of this is fairly trivial and could be hacked together in a shell script in about ten minutes.
Suddenly, a drunken cry comes out of the crowd, and a Ted Kennedy look a like jumps up and fires off a few rounds from his.357 Smith and Wesson (yeah I know he's a US Senator, but I assume he would fly back home if the King of England was invading).
A more realistic picture is of Massachusetts' two senators, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, taking the S&W revolvers away from the populace "for the children."
Don't forget that the constitution does, actually, mandate copyright
Quite true, albiet "for a limited time." I'd like to think that our founding fathers would be in boston throwing CDs into the harbor, but I agree that the power to grant copyright is certainly delegated to the federal government.
and therefore the notion that copyright infringement devices would be a "non-enumerated right" is very, very, dubious at best.
This, however, is another kettle of fish--the question here is: does the congressional power to grant copyright extend to the ability to ban technology that allows others to easily make copies of a protected work? I personally would answer that with an emphatic "no." Is there another section of the constitution that allows this? Maybe, but other than the interstate commerce clause--which has been stretched and twisted beyond even goatse guy's vast flexibility--I can't think of one.
1. I suspect the majority of gun owners use their guns lawfully.
You don't need to suspect, and it's a vast majority. There are almost 80,000,000 of us in the US who own a total of roughly 250,000,000-300,000,000 firearms. Compare with the number of crimes committed with firearms, and you can't help but come to the conclusion that the gun control groups' refrain that ordinary people can't be trusted with firearms is a big bunch of bullshit.
3. Even if both or either of the above were untrue, Guns get a special exemption being, as they are, protected under the second amendment. The Constitution doesn't have anything similar when it comes to P2P clients
This is why some of our founders wanted to avoid a "bill of rights" altogether... the idea that rights that were not enumerated would be seen as less valuable, or unprotected, simply because they weren't mentioned. The fear was that the Constitution would morph from what it was--a document outlining the VERY limited powers of a federal government--into a document that listed a VERY limited number of rights of the people. Sadly, this is what it has become.
You're lumping every self-employed person into the contractor pile. Not every self employed person goes to work for a large company--some of them actually have their own business and function in a completely different way than a contractor does. For example, say you and your wife own a small country store.
Forcing the self-employed to pay both halves of payroll taxes actually creates a disincentive to work for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Prisoners of war are not subject to trial unless it is for war crimes.
Yes, I understand that--hence, "depending on their status and alledged crimes."
The post you responded to noted that I'm against the vast majority of what has been done in the wake of 9/11. Anyone in the US swept up as part of an anti-terror operation should most certainly have their right to a fair and speedy trial respected (or to a cout martial, depending on their status and alledged crimes.)
Christ, look at how many mistakes, lies, and abuses have been sent our way in the WoT, and you still happily take their word for it when they say, "It was a bad website run by bad men. Move along, nothing to see here."
Hold on there, sparky--I take anything said by the US (or in this case, british) government with a large grain of salt. However, "they" sure as hell aren't the ones I'm believing here. I'm taking the press report at face value, yes, until information to the contrary appears. Let's look at this rationally:
Look, I consider myself to be a rabid supporter of civil liberties, but there's a point when you need to accept that something isn't a civil liberties issue, even though it technically meets the definition of "free speech." To use an analogy, it would be like suggesting that a communications tower set up during ww2 for the purpose of vectoring bombers counted as part of a "free press" or that armed foreign soldiers on US soil had a 2nd amendment right to bear those arms. The idea of either of the above being protected rights is absurd on its face--and as I noted elsewhere in this thread, if a mistake has in fact been made, the site owner can step forward and press his/her free speech/press case to the appropriate court--and I, for one, would strongly support their right to do just that.
It doesn't bother you at all that sites are being shut down with basically ZERO accountability and no meaningful description as to what's getting them shut down?
Quite honestly, no, I don't. While I am opposed, in general, to the general sillieness that has resulted from "The War on Terra" (i.e. PATRIOT act, billions spent on absurd airport security measures, the Iraq war, etc) I do accept that the fight against al-Qaeda is a war, albiet one with rather nebulously defined fronts, and very limited objectives for our side other than "keep them from blowing our shit up."
The websites in question were, from the descriptions in the article, communications systems being used by the bad guys. This makes them legitimate military targets. If, in fact, this story is all smoke and mirrors, the website owners can certainly come forward and attempt to press their freedom of speech and/or the press cases (I'm not a Britton, so I don't know how this sort of thing works over there. Presumably, though, citizens--sorry, subjects--have some sort of recourse when their speech is shat upon by the powers that be.)
Or maybe none of what you just said is true at all.
Indeed, this is quite possible.
You're ranting about conspiriacy theorists, and here you are, making shit up. I highly doubt you have a single shred of evidence to back any of that up.
You might not understand this, but in general when someone says "maybe this thing, or maybe this other thing" they are engaged in a process known as "speculation."
My whole point is this doesn't look like a real victory at all. It's probably bad because we're loosing sources of information, and we might be shutting down sites that we shouldn't be.
And this, of course, goes to the heart of why my speculation is far more likely than your "we are teh sux0rs!" ranting. Do you really think that our intelligence arms (and by "our" in this case, I mean "western intelligence assets engaged in tracking al-Qaeda") don't understand that reading the other guy's mail is a good thing? They have admittedly made mistakes in the past, but do you really expect agencies whose heritage includes the Magic and Ultra programs to not grasp this idea?
Maybe this has already been done, and its intelligence gathering value is now outweighed by its usefulness to the bad guys. Or maybe the nature of the resource makes tracking the people who are talking problematic at best.
Unless, of course, you don't actually HAVE any information to back up your claims. So yeah, let's all have a big hurrah for this PR bullshit
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA. The British government isn't making some nebulous claims about terrorism--a newspaper is making the claim that:
- there were various websites affiliated with al-Qaeda,
- lots of them have gone dark, and
- all the information on the matter they've come up with points at the british government as the reason for item 2.
It never ceases to amaze me the conclusions people jump to, despite having no evidence of their conspiracy theories, and having access to information contrary to the idiocy they're spouting. For a good example, see all the "goddamn republicans!" posts in the "porn taxing" story further down the page. The tax in question is being pushed by a democrat, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone.How do you kill someone with a web site? Or is that classified?
I can't tell you who originally said this, but I agree whole heartedly, and I believe it answers your question quite well: "The most dangerous weapon in the world is a set of trained eyes and a radio."
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
However, Microsoft will not release Windows as Open Source. They cannot, because there is too much stolen code in it. **cough**BSD**cough**
Given that the infamous "running strings on ftp.exe" results in the Berkeley Regents copyright notice, I daresay that this code is NOT stolen, and is being used according to license.
No, the real reason this will never happen is that there isn't anything in it for MS--interoperability weakens their monopoly, and Open Source doesn't offer anything compelling enough (to them) to make that kind of move. However, I think we will see more and more dev and system administration tools end up under some form of F/OSS license. They already have a few projects in the wild (two of them are actually hosted on sourceforge!)
That actually has a real benefit to microsoft--particularly if Balmer was serious when he did his monkey dance and shouted "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" The CPL seems to be what they're currently looking at for that sort of thing, let's see how they progress.
Now it's an 18+ they'll sell twice as many copies!
Maybe, maybe not. The AO sticker means that Wal-Mart will pull it from the shelves, which is definitely going to be a negative as far as sales go. The question is "will sales generated by other retailers make up for losing wal-mart?"
Also, how many vipers can they lose from week to week before they start having a major resource issue?
This is actually taken into account by the show. If you read the blog/listen to the podcasts, they mention that there are n many ships available, and no replacements magically appear. At some point, they will have to find a way to replenish them.
A floppy drive is a device to store a real-mode operating system and a BIOS update program. What other device is compatible with the self-extracting-to-floppy-disk BIOS update programs that BIOS publishers distribute?
A keychain drive, when the system supports booting from a USB device?
I guess it's similar to the way Bush convinced 51% of America to vote for him even after such acts like the Patriot Act
Both major candidates have the exact same record on the PATRIOT act--Kerry voted for it, Bush signed it. That makes both of them asshats in my book, and neither one comes out the better.
Because Microsoft will stop supplying security patches, just like they did with NT4. Unless you continue to walk on the upgrade treadmill (or switch to an alternative OS--which is often not possible) it will eventually become impossible to secure your systems. That'll be $299, please.
We never need vigilante violence.
Bullshit.
I'm not a violent person, and I agree with you that the correct way to handle a problem is via the framework we have established to do so (in other words, the courts.) However, we have a legal system, and not a justice system. Sometimes (some would say often, but I won't) it fails. Now what?
Google for "Ken Rex McElroy" and tell me vigilante justice is never justified.
I just knew this topic would generate another GPL vs. BSD argument
I can't help but wonder if you replied to the wrong post? Personally, I see the merits of both BSD and GPL licensing. While I personally prefer the GPL because it forces the code to remain free, I wouldn't presume to tell somebody they had to use it because it was MY preference.
GPL, BSD, CPL, Apache, Public Domain, whatever you want to license your code under--hey, it's YOUR code, right?
I'm going to assume you're smarter than that and mean these two specific incidents.
While these two specific incidents are rather good examples of the point I was trying to get across, no, I do mean in general--it's not a universal attitude, but it happens enough to be the rule rather than the exception.
Case in point, the problems in western Africa (Liberia, etc) a couple of years ago. I read quite a few snide remarks in the international press that America should be intervening, but can't because of being locked in the Iraq war.
So yes, not taking steps to stop a slaughter when you can is vile. And starting a war on the basis of fabricated evidence and outright lies?
Allow me to state for the record that I was opposed to the Iraq war (but think that we must do the responsible thing and clean up the mess made by the current administration.) That said, your position about not taking steps to stop a slaughter CAN be applied to Iraq.
Not that I, personally, would--I don't think the US should be the world's polceman.
Don't blame UN when you own government didn't do shit.
i.e. when the US acts without the backing of the UN, we're the big, evil bully. However, when the US DOESN'T act when the UN is disinterested, we're the big, evil, unfeeling nation who could care less about the plight of the rest of the world. Right?
The GPL, accessible guilt-free wide-spread piracy, and socialism are all related in that they remove the valuation of a product or service.
I disagree with you. More importantly (and far more influentually) the market disagrees with you. Ask IBM, HP, Intel, SGI, Disney, Pixar, Google--I could go on, but I won't--how much value GPL software has. Seems to me that the value of the Linux kernel alone is measured in billions--if not tens or even hundreds of billions--of dollars.
Beyond that, the comparison of GPL code to socialism (a comparison designed to equate the GPL with an idea many consider to be evil) is that the GPL is entirely opt-in. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a socialist or communist nation will find that the products of their labor are forcibly taken and given to others "more deserving" or who "need it more" with the alternative being prison or death. On the other hand, engaging in the development of--or using--software licensed under the GPL is entirely voluntary. RMS is not going to come to your house wearing jackboots and demand you use GCC.
Let's not beat around the bush--companies and individuals HAVE been screwed by productizing GPL software and finding either someone else doing the same, or getting threatening letters from the copyright owners demanding source code. To this, I say: they COULD have elected to develop from scratch, but instead opted to use someone else's work. Exactly why would a rational person expect to be able to take someone else's labor and profit from it without remuneration? THAT sounds more like a socialist state to me, while the GPL's quid-pro-quo sounds quite capitalist in comparison.
Well, not only Wil... I think there were one or two THHGTTG references in this slashdot interview as well.
You could easily use heartbeat for this
:)
I agree--I am aware, peripherally, that tools like that are out there, I just haven't worked with any of them. Your solution is definitely more reliable and more scalable than mine, but I didn't want to spout off about something I wasn't familiar with.
OTOH, using an RS232 link to determine if something on the other end is alive is something I've done before and could actually decribe without researching.
Whenever I see people make this assertion, a little cold chill runs up my spine.
You have to admit, the point is valid--MY blood runs cold whenever I hear someone say "well, the consitution doesn't say anything about $ACTIVITY, so you don't have a RIGHT to do it." We've gone from a climate where a "for example" list of enumerated rights has turned into one where those rights, if not the ONLY ones allowed to you (though getting closer by the day) are certainly given more far weight than others simply because they were mentioned, the 9th amendment be damned.
If this had not been spelled out as a right in the constitution, then these rights would be decided on the state level.
Ah ha, so we reach the crux of why you get shivers down your spine. I don't suppose it would help you to know that the constitution as written DID NOT have any effect on laws at the state level? It wasn't till the post-civil war 14th amendment in 1868 (or, more accurately, until 1897 and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad v. Chicago) that the Bill of Rights began to be applied to the states.
Can you imagine the hodgepodge of laws that we would have had without having a freedom of speech and freedom of religion clauses written into the constitution? Local states and municipalities would have been free to do just that, unchecked.
To dredge up a rather infamous quote in regard to software: it's not a bug, it's a feature. Our system of government was designed with this sort of thing in mind. The idea that someone in Boston should tell someone in Virginia how to go about public and private business (and vice versa) was something the founders were trying to avoid.
(Granted, many did anyhow, but over time the worst of them were abolished because of rulings from the courts)
Err, so what? It's a big country... if your locality does things in ways you don't like, go elsewhere. If you don't like ultra-conservative Utah, ultra-liberal bay area of northern California might just be the place for you.
I do agree with you, to a point. I, too, find it intolerable that basic liberties should be denied anyone. I further agree that at very local levels, this is quite possible and even likely (for a good example, see how alot of HOAs operate.) On the other hand, the situation we have today--where 9 people get to decide questions that impact every section of commerce and government, get to redefine what basic liberties actually mean in direct opposition to what they've meant for centuries, interfere with the election process of one of the "several states" (i.e. Florida, 2000, brought to you courtesy of the 14th amendment), and have these decisions affect all 50 states and 280,000,000 people--is just as bad as the situation you describe, albiet in a different way.
If you put a pentium I computer with a 2 gig hd or something up in front of an entire lab for internet access, I would wonder about the reliability. What I mean is, at work here I was doing something similar - but when the non-rendundant power supply in the 1995 based computer died, my entire part of the office lost net access, which is bad.
So have a pair of them set up in a failover configuration. Connect them with your method of choice (RS232 works), and have the secondary machine periodically poll the primary. If the primary is down, the secondary picks up its IP as an alias. When the RS232 link comes back up, the secondary releases the IP. As an added bonus, you could have half of your machines pointing at each one, and use them for load balancing as well.
The code to do all of this is fairly trivial and could be hacked together in a shell script in about ten minutes.
Suddenly, a drunken cry comes out of the crowd, and a Ted Kennedy look a like jumps up and fires off a few rounds from his .357 Smith and Wesson (yeah I know he's a US Senator, but I assume he would fly back home if the King of England was invading).
A more realistic picture is of Massachusetts' two senators, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, taking the S&W revolvers away from the populace "for the children."
Don't forget that the constitution does, actually, mandate copyright
Quite true, albiet "for a limited time." I'd like to think that our founding fathers would be in boston throwing CDs into the harbor, but I agree that the power to grant copyright is certainly delegated to the federal government.
and therefore the notion that copyright infringement devices would be a "non-enumerated right" is very, very, dubious at best.
This, however, is another kettle of fish--the question here is: does the congressional power to grant copyright extend to the ability to ban technology that allows others to easily make copies of a protected work? I personally would answer that with an emphatic "no." Is there another section of the constitution that allows this? Maybe, but other than the interstate commerce clause--which has been stretched and twisted beyond even goatse guy's vast flexibility--I can't think of one.
1. I suspect the majority of gun owners use their guns lawfully.
You don't need to suspect, and it's a vast majority. There are almost 80,000,000 of us in the US who own a total of roughly 250,000,000-300,000,000 firearms. Compare with the number of crimes committed with firearms, and you can't help but come to the conclusion that the gun control groups' refrain that ordinary people can't be trusted with firearms is a big bunch of bullshit.
3. Even if both or either of the above were untrue, Guns get a special exemption being, as they are, protected under the second amendment. The Constitution doesn't have anything similar when it comes to P2P clients
This is why some of our founders wanted to avoid a "bill of rights" altogether... the idea that rights that were not enumerated would be seen as less valuable, or unprotected, simply because they weren't mentioned. The fear was that the Constitution would morph from what it was--a document outlining the VERY limited powers of a federal government--into a document that listed a VERY limited number of rights of the people. Sadly, this is what it has become.
You're lumping every self-employed person into the contractor pile. Not every self employed person goes to work for a large company--some of them actually have their own business and function in a completely different way than a contractor does. For example, say you and your wife own a small country store.
Forcing the self-employed to pay both halves of payroll taxes actually creates a disincentive to work for yourself.