However, if you are a landlord, and you don't want to rent to first-time renters, gays, unmarried couples, blacks, or a group of 20 year old frat boys, you are no longer "finding roommates" or "creating a household", you are doing housing discrimination. That's wrong, disallowed or illegal, no matter if you are using interviews, walk-throughs, or online websites to do it. I think the only discrimination you can do is the ability of the tenant to pay. You do this with deposits or credit checks and co-signatories.
So what then does roommates.com have to do with any of this? If the distinguishing factor is the intent of the person using the service, does that have any bearing on roommates.com other than perhaps attempting to filter out landlords from using their service?
Put another way, say I sell screwdrivers. The vast majority of people use my screwdrivers to fix things by driving in screws. But if some people use my screwdrivers to break into cars, should I be insulated from the lawsuits of car owners who were the victims of theft?
Yes someone should have to pay for the wrongdoing, but that person should be the one committing the crime. Dragging the vendor into this sounds precisely like what the safe harbor provisions were meant to prevent. That's what seems goofy about this. Nobody is disputing that what the landlords did was illegal. What's at issue is whether we can ask if roommates.com did anything wrong.
I think the important factor in this case was that the gender/orientation information was required in order to proceed with registration on the site. TFA says a free-form response stating the same info would have been acceptable.
This then presents a simple legal solution for roommates.com which from a practical point of view is no different from the current site: Just make the options male, female, and unspecified. People can continue to search for male/female roommates (or unspecified if you don't care), but because roommates.com is no longer requiring this information they would still fall under the safe harbor provisions. Of course in practical use, 99% of the people using the service are going to filter out "unspecified" entries so nothing is actually going to change. But our world is full of silly little things like mattress tags which have become required by law.
Really. Who has 10 different hosting companies to host "some of my websites"?
If this guy actually has 10 businesses or unique sites or whatever (unlikely), wouldn't you pick the one hosting service with the best service plan and just use it?
My guess as to the events leading up to this experiment: He had a bunch of domains but didn't know which hosting companies might be good, so he signed up with 10 different ones. After a year, he's decided which one is best. He was going to transfer all his sites to that one company when he started thinking, "Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be for someone to steal a site from these companies by sending a random email asking for login info..."
Let's see the emails. I'm not saying that they don't say what he claims they say. I'm just thinking it's pretty hypocritical for Microsoft to claim ~250 patent violations in Linux, and everyone here is saying "if they're real, why don't you produce a list of them?" But someone claims to have wayward 500 emails from the US AG office and suddenly people here are proclaiming him the next Messiah of investigative journalism.
Being a critical thinker means approaching what others say with a skeptical eye, even if what they're saying aligns with your political beliefs.
Vietnam - Military lets reporters mix with troops and send uncensored news reports back home. Public support for the war deteriorates, making it politically difficult or impossible for the military to achieve the objectives they were ordered to achieve. Military blames the media for focusing excessively on negativity, costing them the opportunity to win the war.
Gulf War I - Military recognizes the importance of public support for a war, and how important media portrayal is to that support. It controls reporters mixed with troops, and censors news reports back home.
Gulf War II - Military attempts to reproduce media strategy from Gulf War I. It works initially, but as the occupation drags on it starts to fall apart. Military again perceives the media as focusing excessively on negativity. The military realizes they can bypass the media, using the Internet to reach the public directly
The Internet has ushered in a new age in which duplication and distribution of information has (for all practical purposes) zero cost. A lot of the old models we've grown up with aren't going to survive this. We all know what's happening to the music and movie industry. A similar thing is going to happen to the press - they are just the middlemen in the distribution of newsworthy information to the public. They're not going to survive the Internet in the form we all grew up with. The emergence of blogging was the first salvo. There are going to be many more. I don't know where all this is going to lead, or what solution will be the best if we want to preserve some semblance of "objective reporting". But the notion that only the "official press" can distribute true news, and anything else is propaganda, that notion isn't going to survive much longer.
Forget for a moment any biases you may have for or against the military. If any group of people felt (rightly or wrongly) that they had been misrepresented by the press in the past, would you expect them to react any differently? Say a Canadian citizen was unjustly deported by the U.S. during an anti-terrorism investigation to a third country where he was tortured. Say you felt the mass media were not giving his story enough coverage, so you decide to make a web site and post some videos on YouTube publicizing the story. Does that automatically make it propaganda?
Our concepts of "news", "reporting", "objectivity", and "propaganda" are going to go through a lot of changes in the next 20 years.
The full version of the "helicopter kill" video was shown on ABC Nightly News. Watching it, it's pretty obvious the guys who were killed were looking around, trying to make sure they weren't being watched, and trying to minimize the time they were actually in possession of what looks a lot like a SAM launcher tube. It's very ironic that a version of the video edited to make the military look bad should show up in a discussion criticizing the military of propaganda.
The Franklin Expedition was attempting to find and establish a trade route between Europe and East Asia across the Arctic ice cap. All crew members perished within 2 years despite being stocked with enough food and supplies for 5 years. The prevailing theory of their demise is that food canned by the lowest bidder was improperly tinned and cooked, leading to lead and botulism poisoning.
That's not going to happen because this is POLITICS.
Human beings are not wired that way. They form groups. The group can be based upon ANYTHING.
This points out another flaw in our representative system - the misconception that having x% of the votes means you have x% of the power. The smaller the number of voters, the easier it is to deviate from this fallacy. In the simplest case of 3 voters, if 2 of them decide to collaborate, the third voter essentially has zero power even though he holds 33% of the vote. In the particular situation where an individual holds 50.01% of the stock in a corporation, he holds 100% of the power (provided its bylaws require a simple majority vote by stockholders for decisions).
One of the most effective mechanisms for for preventing this is fragmenting the voters so the voting blocks are smaller (or more concisely, no single party comes close to the magic 50% mark). Most foreign countries with dozens of political parties enjoy this situation. The U.S. with just 2 major political parties is in a next-to-worst-case situation (worst case being a dictatorship).
Actually, I think it's to discourage people from driving their personal vehicles and encourage them to take public transportation. There's a similar sign in Medford, MA, and no beach nearby. The road (Mystic Valley Parkway) is the shortest route between I-93 and the Sommerville / Medford / Arlington / Cambridge area, but is only 2 lanes wide for most of its length.
Apparently, Conestoga Valley School District were threatening to not recruit any more teachers from her university, unless she was punished in some way.
I agree the photo provided by Conestoga Valley School District shows her in a worse light, but the fact that (1) the photo was provided by CVSD and (2) it's in black and white implies some info which neither side is telling. Apparently someone at CVSD felt strongly enough about the photo to print it out and save a copy; perhaps to document a report on Ms. Snyder? CVSD is downplaying their involvement in this case, but their possession of the photo (or a related photo) would seem point to them being very involved in the decision to deny her her teaching certificate.
Corporations are fictitious persons under the law. No big problem with that. It lets you take a body of established law, and apply it in a new context (kinda like inheritance in OO programming).
The problem is how these fictitious persons interact with government. They have the financial clout of the aggregate of their employees, but they are under the control of a small subset of those employees. We live in a representative democracy. Politicians are supposed to represent the voters. So it seems to me the simple solution is to just ban all campaign contributions by anyone or anything except registered voters. Corporations can still lobby for politicians' time (arrange meetings to air their grievances) and run political advertisements. But no more donating to campaigns or party war chests. To directly contribute to a representative's election, you should have to be able to vote in that election.
A sovereign country's citizens should be tried under that country's law, unless the US fancies an international court to handle international crimes.
They do.
Just so long as it doesn't involve US citizens. Or military personnel.
When dealing with U.S. citizens (and non-citizens on U.S. soil * ), the US government (of which its military is a part) has to abide by a certain set of individuals' rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution. This includes some stringent requirements on due process. If a host country does not guarantee the same or greater rights for an accused U.S. soldier, it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the U.S. military to simply turn the soldier over to the host country for trial. He needs to be tried under U.S. law first to determine his guilt (or probable guilt) thus fulfilling the U.S. military's Constitutional obligations, after which he can be turned over. Soldiers who are thusly found to be guilty are either turned over, or sentenced under U.S. law.
The problem here is that apparently Australia doesn't have similar protections in its Constitution which prohibits its government from simply turning over its citizens to a foreign power. You are correctly pointing out an asymmetric legal situation, but from a human rights perspective the U.S. legal stance is superior - its citizens are shielded from foreign laws while under U.S. jurisdiction. In other words: Stop trying to blame the U.S. for something which is screwed up in Australia. If you have a problem with it, get Australia to fix its laws before the U.S. (or any other country) takes advantage of it again.
* This is why Bush sent foreign prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. Technically it is not U.S. soil, it is Cuban soil, so he was hoping to avoid this "inconvenient" bit of U.S. law. Fortunately the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that the people detained there still enjoy the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution.
Remind me again why ANY health-care activity should be for-profit. ANY. Band-aids to heart surgery.
Because as of yet, we have not found, in general, any motivating force greater than capitalism. (One could make an argument for religion, but that's a wildly unpopular option here.)
Why is selling food to starving Africans profiteering (which it is), but selling healthcare to people in pain or danger of death, not profiteering?
Food is a necessity. Longer lifespan and higher quality of life are luxuries.
Look, I agree with you that it's bad when corporations gouge people who need a drug to continue living. But we're not talking about good versus evil here, we're talking about what system works better. Yes capitalism in pharmaceuticals has its bad sides, but having negative characteristics in and of itself should not automatically discount a system as an option. We need to line up all the systems (e.g. others have suggested government-funded drug research by academia) and weigh the pros and cons of each, possibly giving them trials to see if how they work in theory is how they work in reality. It may well be that despite the flaws, for-profit pharmaceutical companies are the most effective solution to advancing medicine and improving overall quality of life. The MO in the U.S. is (for better or for worse), if in doubt, make it capitalistic until it becomes apparent that a better solution is needed and exists (as happened with pollution, automobile safety, anti-trust, insider trading, etc).
Re:The value of good user interface design...
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Highly paid and well motivated creative engineers will always trounce cheap, carelessly designed and manufactured, knock-offs.
I'd say highly paid and well-motivated creative engineers working together with highly paid and well-motivated creative designers will produce a good product. I've seen, and there have been several recent Slashdot stories on, the results of projects where engineers are in total charge (note: IAAE - I am an Engineer). Usually it'll have every feature you would want under the sun, but you have to dig through a 500 page manual and follow Rube Goldberg-esque instructions to use a particular feature. Likewise, I've seen projects where designers are in total charge. Everything will look spiffy and there are lots of promised features, but it won't work very well or will break the moment you try an atypical use.
Both of these types of people tend to sneer at the other, thinking that what the other is working on is totally unimportant. But to create a really good product requires that they learn to work with each other and respect each other's fields and contributions.
"Poking their nose into someone else's business" implies the party doing the poking has no vested interest in the outcome. I would argue that the U.S. does what it does because it does have a vested interest in the outcome. The U.S. see the Netherlands as a haven for drug traffickers (true or not) exacerbating a domestic drug problem (so it believes), so they pressure the Dutch into implementing certain policies. The U.S. sees music and software piracy as detrimental to industries based in the U.S. (true or not), so they pressure other countries into cracking down on copyright infringers. If you think about it, it's totally unreasonable to expect an entity (individual or government) to not advocate the things it wants. He who buys high and sells low does not stay in business for long.
The other aspect of this is that any agreement has to be reached by the mutual consent of two parties. AFAIK the U.S. has not resorted to threats of physical violence in these cases (Iran, Iraq, North Korea excepted). So the agreement is entirely socio-economic. The U.S. says if the Dutch don't do what they want, they'll take their ball and go home. While that's certainly immature behavior on the part of the U.S., it is well within its rights to do so. The Dutch do not have a fundamental right to play with the U.S.'s ball, and their rights are not being violated if the U.S. decides to take the ball away.
So then the question is simply one of negotiation and price. The Dutch evaluated what the U.S. was offering for complying with the U.S.'s requests, and decided it wasn't worth it. The Swedes did the same, and decided it was worth it to them to comply with the U.S.'s requests. The Swedes are the ones you should be mad at - they sold out. The U.S. did not hold a gun to their heads, they simply offered certain things (including possibly the threat to take away existing socio-economic relationships). The Swedes were the ones who decided it was worth it to them to do what the U.S. wanted. You do the same kind of decision-making when buying a car, unless you're one of those people who always pays whatever the dealer asks for.
Yes, the U.S. may use its economic clout to bully others. But those policies are what allowed it to gain that economic clout in the first place. It's irrational to believe it would spontaneously give up that which allowed it to become powerful (and indeed one could argue that it remains powerful because it adheres to those policies). Like all bullies, if you want to get rid of them, you have to stand up to them. The world's economy is 3x larger than the U.S.'s. The U.S. needs the world more than the world needs the U.S.
If you're purchasing a license to listen to the music, and you've already paid for a record or tape or CD of the music in the past, then you already have a license. They should be giving you the MP3 for free, not 99 cents.
The problem is they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to limit your rights to use your purchase as if it were a license. But they want you to buy it over and over again as if it were a product. If they would just pick one or the other (like the software industry has picked the license and gives free replacements and discounted upgrades), a lot of these contradictions would disappear.
We need to get left behind to shake up our policy makers. After a decade of stupid laws that kill innovation in this country, and start an economic recession, maybe people will wake up to the fact that conservative candidates and ideas need to be tossed out. You can not have progress without change. Conservatives, by nature and definition, resist change.
Yup, conservatives like the Democratic Congress and Bill Clinton who passed and signed the DMCA.
The problem isn't conservatives or liberals. It's politicians bought by special interests.
Someone engages in work for a charity and then doesn't get a big payoff. What's the problem again?
I suspect most people who donate time/money to a charity do so under the assumption that nobody will get a big payoff from it (unless you consider the beneficiaries of the charity as a whole to have gotten a big payoff). It's the same reason people feel conned when they find out a charity they donated to uses 90% of its received donations to pay for administrative overhead.
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break!
I used to think that until the early 1990s. Windows was still using cooperative multitasking and Linux wasn't mainstream yet, so the only choice for a "real" OS on the PC was OS/2. I'd been following news reports on OS/2 pretty closely. In one issue of a weekly tech magazine, Information Week I think, they had an article titled something like "New version of OS/2 to be delayed." The article went on about how IBM chose to delay it to add some more features. Literally a few pages away there was an article about the new version of Windows titled something like "Chicago to gain new features" (Chicago was the code name for Windows 95). Further in the article it explained that because of the new features, the next version of Windows would be delayed...
Two articles in the same issue of the same trade rag saying pretty much the exact same thing, yet the Microsoft article got a title emphasizing the positive, while the IBM article got a title emphasizing the negative. I couldn't believe it when I first heard it, but I pulled out my copy of the magazine and sure enough it was true. There is a bias among the media out there. It may not be deliberate or even pervasive, but it's definitely there. (Granted Apple may benefit as much if not more from a pro-Apple bias.)
The reason global warming has no credibility is because of reactionaries, yes, but also because the arguments made have not been internally or scientificially consistent for 30 years. You cry wolf long enough bolstering your points with manipulated data, and nobody is going to believe a word you say. Whether it's 'global cooling' from 30 years ago, 'global warming' a year ago, or what they're calling 'global climate change' today (yeah, apparently calling it global warming or cooling doesn't work anymore, because nobody believes a word of it), it doesn't matter the slightest.
Why can't both global warming (which I'll define as increase in temperature due to CO2 emissions) and global cooling (which I'll define as decrease in temperatures due to aerosol emissions) both be happening? By characterizing it as temperature change, you've artificially limited what's going on to the net result - one or the other must be true. It says nothing about the veracity of the mechanism behind both changes. Who knows, maybe both mechanisms are correct and real, and in the 1970s the effect of aerosol production masked the effect of CO2 emissions; while from 2000 on the reverse was true? Just because the inside of my car is getting hotter doesn't mean I don't have my air conditioner on.
"Global warming" is the Left's "imminent emergency" scenario which they utilize to the greatest political end economic manipulation as possible - just like the Right's "war on terror" is its "imminent emergency".
They are complying with the DMCA takedown notices. The problem is, as soon as one takedown is done, another copy goes up under another title or user name. It is like playing whack-a-mole.
I think you've just hit on the real heart of the matter. There has been a huge paradigm shift (yes I know that phrase has been subverted by marketing people, but it's the correct phrase for what's going on). Before there were just a few people and corporations who oversaw 99% of the content seen by the public. Your band or home movies could be a local hit, but to go national or global, you needed the help of the media. The Internet changed all that, and now a 5-year old can, with a few mouse clicks, "publish" a video that could be seen by millions or even more than a billion people.
The power to publish has shifted from the media to the general population.
Legislating things like the DMCA and takedown notices is futile. It's like whack-a-mole because anyone can re-publish what was taken down. It's like declaring piss to be toxic waste. You can pass all the laws you want prohibiting people from dumping it into the ground and sewers, but they're still going to do it anyway. What's needed is a reassessment and redesign of the entire system, starting with some fundamental assumptions about what people are going to do regardless of the laws you pass. Wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for little cost, but charge an arm and a leg for the prints. Then scanners and photo printers dropped in price so anybody could make their own duplicates. So now wedding photographers charge a lot for the shoot, but sell the prints practically at-cost. Stop making laws that try to preserve the old reality when faced with a new reality. Adapt or die.
Note: I take photos, write software, and have a graduate degree in engineering. So I believe copyrights and patents add value to our lives. But at the same time I also see that the old way we used to do things isn't going to work anymore with the cost of duplication rapidly approaching zero.
Look, I'm no fan of RIAA, but this is judicial activism at its best. These records are clearly covered by attorney-client confidentiality and this order is going to get slapped down on appeal faster than you can say denied (IAAL).
So by that reasoning, how much Ms. Foster paid her attorneys is covered by attorney-client confidentiality, and RIAA should just shut up and pay the bill? RIAA decided to make an issue of Ms. Foster's attorney fees being unreasonable. The judge, in a "one person cuts the cake, the other person picks the piece" stroke of wisdom, decided to use RIAA's attorney fees as a measuring stick for what was reasonable.
People only have a fixed amount of needs. X amount of food, clothing, a roof over their head, perhaps some basic level of medical care and they're set. In medieval times the agricultural and manufacturing efficiency was low enough that often all of these were not produced in enough quantity, and people went hungry or cold. The very definition of economic development is improved production efficiency. You can grow those crops or manufacture those huts (or houses) for less energy, time, labor, resources, and cost than before.
At some point, probably back around when the Industrial Revolution got into full swing, the efficiency got high enough that humanity as a whole moved past the point where 100% of people's time was needed to work to cover just the basic needs. There are still localized regions without enough productivity, and regions with excess productivity. But as a whole, if we produced and manufactured only was what we needed, we would be spending more than half of our time sitting around doing nothing. That extra time goes into producing and consuming nonessentials, like television, amusement parks, video games, and, yes, posting on Slashdot.
Our production is efficient enough that we can produce (and use) these nonessentials without impacting the production of essentials. People are willing to spend the time to make, sell, and buy these items. And so our "free" time is spent doing just that. To argue that we should only be producing what we need is to argue that (A) we sit around most of the day doing nothing, or (B) we roll back our technological progress to the point where once again 100% of our time is spent producing essentials.
It's possible to use any Sprint Vision-enabled phone as a modem. However, the new ones are specifically made in a way so Sprint can tell when they're being used as a modem. If you use them that way excessively, Sprint may require you to switch to a full-blown data plan.
All of the EVDO (3G) capable Sprint phones (sold as "Power Vision capable") will distinguish modem use except the PPC6700, the Sanyo MM-9000, and I believe the Samsung a900. With these phones, Sprint has no way of telling if you're using it as a modem or if you're using the built-in browser. The latter two were pulled from the market for this reason.
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Put another way, say I sell screwdrivers. The vast majority of people use my screwdrivers to fix things by driving in screws. But if some people use my screwdrivers to break into cars, should I be insulated from the lawsuits of car owners who were the victims of theft?
Yes someone should have to pay for the wrongdoing, but that person should be the one committing the crime. Dragging the vendor into this sounds precisely like what the safe harbor provisions were meant to prevent. That's what seems goofy about this. Nobody is disputing that what the landlords did was illegal. What's at issue is whether we can ask if roommates.com did anything wrong.
This then presents a simple legal solution for roommates.com which from a practical point of view is no different from the current site: Just make the options male, female, and unspecified. People can continue to search for male/female roommates (or unspecified if you don't care), but because roommates.com is no longer requiring this information they would still fall under the safe harbor provisions. Of course in practical use, 99% of the people using the service are going to filter out "unspecified" entries so nothing is actually going to change. But our world is full of silly little things like mattress tags which have become required by law.
Being a critical thinker means approaching what others say with a skeptical eye, even if what they're saying aligns with your political beliefs.
Gulf War I - Military recognizes the importance of public support for a war, and how important media portrayal is to that support. It controls reporters mixed with troops, and censors news reports back home.
Gulf War II - Military attempts to reproduce media strategy from Gulf War I. It works initially, but as the occupation drags on it starts to fall apart. Military again perceives the media as focusing excessively on negativity. The military realizes they can bypass the media, using the Internet to reach the public directly
The Internet has ushered in a new age in which duplication and distribution of information has (for all practical purposes) zero cost. A lot of the old models we've grown up with aren't going to survive this. We all know what's happening to the music and movie industry. A similar thing is going to happen to the press - they are just the middlemen in the distribution of newsworthy information to the public. They're not going to survive the Internet in the form we all grew up with. The emergence of blogging was the first salvo. There are going to be many more. I don't know where all this is going to lead, or what solution will be the best if we want to preserve some semblance of "objective reporting". But the notion that only the "official press" can distribute true news, and anything else is propaganda, that notion isn't going to survive much longer.
Forget for a moment any biases you may have for or against the military. If any group of people felt (rightly or wrongly) that they had been misrepresented by the press in the past, would you expect them to react any differently? Say a Canadian citizen was unjustly deported by the U.S. during an anti-terrorism investigation to a third country where he was tortured. Say you felt the mass media were not giving his story enough coverage, so you decide to make a web site and post some videos on YouTube publicizing the story. Does that automatically make it propaganda?
Our concepts of "news", "reporting", "objectivity", and "propaganda" are going to go through a lot of changes in the next 20 years.
The full version of the "helicopter kill" video was shown on ABC Nightly News. Watching it, it's pretty obvious the guys who were killed were looking around, trying to make sure they weren't being watched, and trying to minimize the time they were actually in possession of what looks a lot like a SAM launcher tube. It's very ironic that a version of the video edited to make the military look bad should show up in a discussion criticizing the military of propaganda.
The Franklin Expedition was attempting to find and establish a trade route between Europe and East Asia across the Arctic ice cap. All crew members perished within 2 years despite being stocked with enough food and supplies for 5 years. The prevailing theory of their demise is that food canned by the lowest bidder was improperly tinned and cooked, leading to lead and botulism poisoning.
One of the most effective mechanisms for for preventing this is fragmenting the voters so the voting blocks are smaller (or more concisely, no single party comes close to the magic 50% mark). Most foreign countries with dozens of political parties enjoy this situation. The U.S. with just 2 major political parties is in a next-to-worst-case situation (worst case being a dictatorship).
Actually, I think it's to discourage people from driving their personal vehicles and encourage them to take public transportation. There's a similar sign in Medford, MA, and no beach nearby. The road (Mystic Valley Parkway) is the shortest route between I-93 and the Sommerville / Medford / Arlington / Cambridge area, but is only 2 lanes wide for most of its length.
I agree the photo provided by Conestoga Valley School District shows her in a worse light, but the fact that (1) the photo was provided by CVSD and (2) it's in black and white implies some info which neither side is telling. Apparently someone at CVSD felt strongly enough about the photo to print it out and save a copy; perhaps to document a report on Ms. Snyder? CVSD is downplaying their involvement in this case, but their possession of the photo (or a related photo) would seem point to them being very involved in the decision to deny her her teaching certificate.
The problem is how these fictitious persons interact with government. They have the financial clout of the aggregate of their employees, but they are under the control of a small subset of those employees. We live in a representative democracy. Politicians are supposed to represent the voters. So it seems to me the simple solution is to just ban all campaign contributions by anyone or anything except registered voters. Corporations can still lobby for politicians' time (arrange meetings to air their grievances) and run political advertisements. But no more donating to campaigns or party war chests. To directly contribute to a representative's election, you should have to be able to vote in that election.
They do.
Just so long as it doesn't involve US citizens. Or military personnel.
When dealing with U.S. citizens (and non-citizens on U.S. soil * ), the US government (of which its military is a part) has to abide by a certain set of individuals' rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution. This includes some stringent requirements on due process. If a host country does not guarantee the same or greater rights for an accused U.S. soldier, it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the U.S. military to simply turn the soldier over to the host country for trial. He needs to be tried under U.S. law first to determine his guilt (or probable guilt) thus fulfilling the U.S. military's Constitutional obligations, after which he can be turned over. Soldiers who are thusly found to be guilty are either turned over, or sentenced under U.S. law.
The problem here is that apparently Australia doesn't have similar protections in its Constitution which prohibits its government from simply turning over its citizens to a foreign power. You are correctly pointing out an asymmetric legal situation, but from a human rights perspective the U.S. legal stance is superior - its citizens are shielded from foreign laws while under U.S. jurisdiction. In other words: Stop trying to blame the U.S. for something which is screwed up in Australia. If you have a problem with it, get Australia to fix its laws before the U.S. (or any other country) takes advantage of it again.
* This is why Bush sent foreign prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. Technically it is not U.S. soil, it is Cuban soil, so he was hoping to avoid this "inconvenient" bit of U.S. law. Fortunately the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that the people detained there still enjoy the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution.
Because as of yet, we have not found, in general, any motivating force greater than capitalism. (One could make an argument for religion, but that's a wildly unpopular option here.)
Why is selling food to starving Africans profiteering (which it is), but selling healthcare to people in pain or danger of death, not profiteering?
Food is a necessity. Longer lifespan and higher quality of life are luxuries.
Look, I agree with you that it's bad when corporations gouge people who need a drug to continue living. But we're not talking about good versus evil here, we're talking about what system works better. Yes capitalism in pharmaceuticals has its bad sides, but having negative characteristics in and of itself should not automatically discount a system as an option. We need to line up all the systems (e.g. others have suggested government-funded drug research by academia) and weigh the pros and cons of each, possibly giving them trials to see if how they work in theory is how they work in reality. It may well be that despite the flaws, for-profit pharmaceutical companies are the most effective solution to advancing medicine and improving overall quality of life. The MO in the U.S. is (for better or for worse), if in doubt, make it capitalistic until it becomes apparent that a better solution is needed and exists (as happened with pollution, automobile safety, anti-trust, insider trading, etc).
I'd say highly paid and well-motivated creative engineers working together with highly paid and well-motivated creative designers will produce a good product. I've seen, and there have been several recent Slashdot stories on, the results of projects where engineers are in total charge (note: IAAE - I am an Engineer). Usually it'll have every feature you would want under the sun, but you have to dig through a 500 page manual and follow Rube Goldberg-esque instructions to use a particular feature. Likewise, I've seen projects where designers are in total charge. Everything will look spiffy and there are lots of promised features, but it won't work very well or will break the moment you try an atypical use.
Both of these types of people tend to sneer at the other, thinking that what the other is working on is totally unimportant. But to create a really good product requires that they learn to work with each other and respect each other's fields and contributions.
The other aspect of this is that any agreement has to be reached by the mutual consent of two parties. AFAIK the U.S. has not resorted to threats of physical violence in these cases (Iran, Iraq, North Korea excepted). So the agreement is entirely socio-economic. The U.S. says if the Dutch don't do what they want, they'll take their ball and go home. While that's certainly immature behavior on the part of the U.S., it is well within its rights to do so. The Dutch do not have a fundamental right to play with the U.S.'s ball, and their rights are not being violated if the U.S. decides to take the ball away.
So then the question is simply one of negotiation and price. The Dutch evaluated what the U.S. was offering for complying with the U.S.'s requests, and decided it wasn't worth it. The Swedes did the same, and decided it was worth it to them to comply with the U.S.'s requests. The Swedes are the ones you should be mad at - they sold out. The U.S. did not hold a gun to their heads, they simply offered certain things (including possibly the threat to take away existing socio-economic relationships). The Swedes were the ones who decided it was worth it to them to do what the U.S. wanted. You do the same kind of decision-making when buying a car, unless you're one of those people who always pays whatever the dealer asks for.
Yes, the U.S. may use its economic clout to bully others. But those policies are what allowed it to gain that economic clout in the first place. It's irrational to believe it would spontaneously give up that which allowed it to become powerful (and indeed one could argue that it remains powerful because it adheres to those policies). Like all bullies, if you want to get rid of them, you have to stand up to them. The world's economy is 3x larger than the U.S.'s. The U.S. needs the world more than the world needs the U.S.
The problem is they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to limit your rights to use your purchase as if it were a license. But they want you to buy it over and over again as if it were a product. If they would just pick one or the other (like the software industry has picked the license and gives free replacements and discounted upgrades), a lot of these contradictions would disappear.
The problem isn't conservatives or liberals. It's politicians bought by special interests.
Two articles in the same issue of the same trade rag saying pretty much the exact same thing, yet the Microsoft article got a title emphasizing the positive, while the IBM article got a title emphasizing the negative. I couldn't believe it when I first heard it, but I pulled out my copy of the magazine and sure enough it was true. There is a bias among the media out there. It may not be deliberate or even pervasive, but it's definitely there. (Granted Apple may benefit as much if not more from a pro-Apple bias.)
The power to publish has shifted from the media to the general population.
Legislating things like the DMCA and takedown notices is futile. It's like whack-a-mole because anyone can re-publish what was taken down. It's like declaring piss to be toxic waste. You can pass all the laws you want prohibiting people from dumping it into the ground and sewers, but they're still going to do it anyway. What's needed is a reassessment and redesign of the entire system, starting with some fundamental assumptions about what people are going to do regardless of the laws you pass. Wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for little cost, but charge an arm and a leg for the prints. Then scanners and photo printers dropped in price so anybody could make their own duplicates. So now wedding photographers charge a lot for the shoot, but sell the prints practically at-cost. Stop making laws that try to preserve the old reality when faced with a new reality. Adapt or die.
Note: I take photos, write software, and have a graduate degree in engineering. So I believe copyrights and patents add value to our lives. But at the same time I also see that the old way we used to do things isn't going to work anymore with the cost of duplication rapidly approaching zero.
At some point, probably back around when the Industrial Revolution got into full swing, the efficiency got high enough that humanity as a whole moved past the point where 100% of people's time was needed to work to cover just the basic needs. There are still localized regions without enough productivity, and regions with excess productivity. But as a whole, if we produced and manufactured only was what we needed, we would be spending more than half of our time sitting around doing nothing. That extra time goes into producing and consuming nonessentials, like television, amusement parks, video games, and, yes, posting on Slashdot.
Our production is efficient enough that we can produce (and use) these nonessentials without impacting the production of essentials. People are willing to spend the time to make, sell, and buy these items. And so our "free" time is spent doing just that. To argue that we should only be producing what we need is to argue that (A) we sit around most of the day doing nothing, or (B) we roll back our technological progress to the point where once again 100% of our time is spent producing essentials.
All of the EVDO (3G) capable Sprint phones (sold as "Power Vision capable") will distinguish modem use except the PPC6700, the Sanyo MM-9000, and I believe the Samsung a900. With these phones, Sprint has no way of telling if you're using it as a modem or if you're using the built-in browser. The latter two were pulled from the market for this reason.