a) Health care, unlike most other suggested rights -- such as free speech, to not quarter troops and so forth -- is a service, and in fact an exceedingly expensive one.
1. It needs to be paid for.
2. Somebody needs to provide it.
If there is a right to it, then there must be both a right to the funds for it, and also a way to coerce providers into supplying it. The Federal government arguably doesn't have jurisdiction over it; it is NOT an enumerated power, and arguably for almost anything that the Feds could do with it, the States legally could -- if their individual Constitutions permit.
b) No self-contradiction. Execution is the society's ultimate means of self-defense; individuals are also empowered to use self-defense within reason -- for instance, to use deadly force in most states, if not all, requires a probable, immediate and very serious threat; shooting squeegee men isn't approved, nor is maiming people for no particular reason at all. Self-defense is the right, not wanton mayhem.
Technically, there are limits to freedom -- even political speech.
For instance, campaign contributions have been recognized by SCOTUS as being free speech (Buckley v. Vallejo, IIRC) -- but, they also ruled that there is a compelling interest in regulating it in order to reduce even the semblance of corruption; a contribution forbidden by the regulations is illegal even if no corruption is actually involved.
The FEC, therefore, has jurisdiction over this sort of stuff. And if one interprets parody anti-Bush sites as political advertising -- particularly if they are also pro-Gore, as some are IIRC -- then it is arguable that these are services essentially contributed to a campaign, and therefore should fall under the scope of the regulations. ISTR, in fact, that there was once a Slashdot story mentioning the FEC's stance regarding political statements online by third parties and the possible need to determine how much value was put into them.
In that sense, as long as political ads on television are constrained, perhaps political parody sites -- mostly set up to trash a candidate, and usually promote his main rival -- should be regulated too.
Precisely, which makes the concept that there's only so much money to go around patently bizarre.
Practical case --
Some years ago, Brazillian banks paid 1% interest per day for savings accounts; they had to offer this, just to keep up with inflation. Anybody who claims that can happen, while suggesting that the money supply is in fact largely static, is either claiming that demand for goods was, strangely, increasing a corresponding amount in general (and thus driving up prices), or that there was a general conspiracy to raise prices across all sectors of the economy, (which seems just as weird), or that the Brazillians were just being completely wacky (ditto).
The only plausible way to account for that was that the money supply was increasing, essentially devaluing the currency and forcing people to exchange greater and greater amounts (in absolute terms, not necessarily relative to value) for the same goods.
Value is created. Just because Mr. Ellison may have tens of billions of dollars doesn't mean that others have lost tens of billions of dollars that they'll never recover; they in turn create goods and perform services with their own intrinsic value. Economics isn't zero-sum no matter what a fringe may believe.
If money and value are conserved, then how does the Treasury Department and the banking system increase the money supply, and why is it possible to have inflation that increases far faster than population growth and any possible demand could outstrip supply?
.
Or the time and effort spent on jury consulting? It's done for a reason -- because jurors DO bring biases, and some of them are fairly predictable based on things like social class, race, gender and so forth. The evidence ranges from presentation details (dress the defendant in a suit -- which SHOULDN'T matter to an unbiased jury deciding solely on points of fact and law) to peremptory challenges based on probable biases and so forth.
Jurors are people. People are biased. You can't escape that.
Odd comment, considering that either MSFT gets broken up (which sends a pretty strong message to business, and should make companies think twice about imitating them), or the DOJ and the states get smacked (which sends a pretty strong message to DAs and the DOJ about the standards required for sustaining an anti-trust case). Either way, something's going to change.
And, even if somebody believes that Bush would be sufficiently pro-MSFT and brazen enough to pull the DOJ off the case -- which seems unlikely given its high profile -- don't forget that there are plenty of states in on the case that wouldn't drop. Remember the Big Tobacco settlement? The Feds weren't really involved on the plaintiff's side until they smelled money; it was pretty much all handled by the states.
Everything ranging from possessing a long gun (even many semi-automatics are banned in NYC... although hunting rifles are rarely used for urban crime) to, say, kissing without asking for permission (IIRC, a ban was proposed as part of an Amherst U. policy on sexual harrassment), to smoking in a public place (illegal in many more liberal areas), and so forth.
A really devious person might try to figure out whether there's any way to sneak a trojan in -- e.g. depending on how thorough they are, such as flashing the BIOS, etc.
Re:A classic illusion...Why the missile shield?
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
The terrorist angle seems more a problem for the CIA and friends (Mossad, arguably FSB -- I doubt that Russia's activities in Chechnya have won them any friends among, say, Islamic Jihad and friends, the various British organizations..) than NMD.
Terrorists could use a missile, true. But -- on what vehicle? A fixed silo can be guarded rather heavily, and in turn is a fixed target... but a submarine is designed to be able to operate rather stealthily independently for long periods at a time. And a submarine could perhaps get fairly close to a US (or Israeli, or Russian, or British) coast, which should probably result in a faster transit time to target and a smaller -- perhaps a completely impractical -- window for interception. So there's a case to be made that it's far more efficient to focus on infiltration and prevention, in the case of subversion.
The NMD case seems stronger against the possibility of nations that aren't easily deterred. For instance, Iraqi agents were, if memory serves, at one time arrested while plotting to assassinate former President Bush. Obviously, such a (perhaps useless; he was, after all, _former_) reckless act would lead to reprisals... but apparently, he didn't care. He also shows no particular regard for his civillian population, or in fact for most of his military. So somebody like him might indeed be tempted to launch, if he had one, regardless of US response. And for such a scenario NMD makes sense.
Re:Think of the threats, though...
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
Right on regarding the power -- if they can figure out how and when to intercept. For now, that's a very big if.
The terrorist scenario is a good motivation for boosting the assets of the CIA and FBI for their investigative roles; the primary way of stopping such operations is infiltration and espionage beforehand since you can't possibly search all transport methods. You can, however, take advantage of the fact that people talk, and can also be pressured. Especially with the help of our allies; I have no doubt that the Mossad, for instance, would try very hard if they learned that, say, Hezbollah obtained a nuclear warhead -- and they've been less politically hamstrung than our own agencies.
GRU[*] Col. Oleg Penkovsky, an asset run by both the British and the Americans, passed along such valuable documents as the missile site construction plans early on, allowing them to figure out what exactly was being built on Cuba. In 1962, he was arrested by the KGB, and presumably interrogated and executed...
Source -- Andrew, Christopher. "The Sword and the Shield", Basic Books, 1999.
[*] Soviet military intelligence, which made him a VERY useful asset until he was caught.
Re:Bombs might be more likely, but not nuclear war
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
How about the possibility of a rogue submarine equipped with ICBMs? A single sub can carry many, perhaps with multiple warheads, and everything needed for launching; and I'd be surprised if the Russians either a) disarmed all their submarines, or b) pay them extremely well (enough, say, to completely prevent bribery... or other means of coercion, like threats against family) given their perpetual fiscal problems.
You can't effectively retalliate if you can't even identify, let alone find, your attacker. It also makes it harder to assess the magnitude of the potential threat. It may not mean the End of the World, but it's great for blackmail. And what if two subs were subverted... and then Moscow and D.C. both were hit? The responses might be... interesting.
Remember, even Canter and Siegel got customers -- and their obnoxiousness is the stuff of legends and alt.flame. And, it's almost certainly inexpensive to advertise this way, at least compared to print, radio or television. So if you're advertising something expensive, you can really afford a low click-through ratio. You may not want to see these ads, but enough people apparently do.
And it's akin to IP. You don't really have a right to dictate to a content provider whether or not they choose ads, barring a contract granting you those rights. You have no "right" to force, say, Yahoo!, to stop airing ads; they're the content provider, not you. They were never even obligated to create the site, let alone follow your specifications.
You're free to design your own ad-free portal serving e-mail and other services to hundreds of thousands at your own leisure. You can ask it of Yahoo!. But you have no right to compel them, any more than they can compel you to visit their site.
For now, you're legally free to block their ads via proxies and so forth, or even editing the source of a free browser and using that. But Yahoo!'s owners -- its shareholders -- have the final say on whether or not ads will be there.
Napster, 'coz a) it's actively providing a search service, and thus you can argue that they're negligent in not providing barriers there, b) that they have been, from Day 1, aware that they would have this problem (according to internal memos, IIRC), that it would be *endemic*, and that they chose to pretty much ignore it -- fully aware that mass infringement would raise their profile and customer base.
The users doing the unauthorized uploading, because they're infringing on copyrights.
The users doing the unauthorized downloading (in most cases, knowingly I'd think...), because they're infringing.
Maybe because Prodigy is in serious trouble -- losing 90% of your market cap in a year is painful. Perhaps Prodigy can't afford to divert that much time and money to defending a patent suit?
It'll be bad if BT offers, and Prodigy accepts, a settlement that's relatively cheap compared to the legal expense of fighting it, and if BT then offered the same deal to others.
IF the company states that. And your mod doesn't infringe on anybody else's rights -- both the rights holders of the game for which the mod works, and the rights holders of any other IP you use. An X-Files mod for Quake would need to be possible under licensing from both Fox and id Software. This is regardless of whatever effect, or lack of effect, your mod has on either company. And many companies don't grant these rights by default...
If the game maker is also in the business of extending the game -- like offering a registered version with more levels than a full version, or making agreements to license level collections -- then making a mod and distributing it without their authorization is hurting them.
Some vendors do billing address verification now, methinks -- so you have to guess the card number, usually expiration date, *and* billing address all correct. That's a much greater number of bits in the combination.
So use a Tcl/Tk script that simply execs CLI programs.
You can put a GUI on top of many CLIs; you'll probably lose pipes unless you've got a darn GOOD GUI system, but it'll work. Take user adding/removing, for instance; on many Linux distros, you can use control-panel-type utilities to do this -- but you can still use a text editor or Perl script, because the GUI's merely a front-end.
You generally can't trivally make a CLI out of a GUI if the GUI author didn't give you one.
Windows can be very finicky when it comes to hardware.
I've seen plain-Jane machines that deterministically crashed when NT4 did its peripheral scanning during installation, baffling the local tech support. This, as it happens, was while working at a certain large software company in Redmond, WA.
It'd still be forgery. Hell, it'd be the same offense if he were hijacking a site run by Cyberpromo at the height of Sanford Wallace's spamming days, regardless of whatever MSFT and Cyberpromo have done.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Health care, unlike most other suggested rights -- such as free speech, to not quarter troops and so forth -- is a service, and in fact an exceedingly expensive one.
1. It needs to be paid for.
2. Somebody needs to provide it.
If there is a right to it, then there must be both a right to the funds for it, and also a way to coerce providers into supplying it. The Federal government arguably doesn't have jurisdiction over it; it is NOT an enumerated power, and arguably for almost anything that the Feds could do with it, the States legally could -- if their individual Constitutions permit.
b) No self-contradiction. Execution is the society's ultimate means of self-defense; individuals are also empowered to use self-defense within reason -- for instance, to use deadly force in most states, if not all, requires a probable, immediate and very serious threat; shooting squeegee men isn't approved, nor is maiming people for no particular reason at all. Self-defense is the right, not wanton mayhem.
Technically, there are limits to freedom -- even political speech.
For instance, campaign contributions have been recognized by SCOTUS as being free speech (Buckley v. Vallejo, IIRC) -- but, they also ruled that there is a compelling interest in regulating it in order to reduce even the semblance of corruption; a contribution forbidden by the regulations is illegal even if no corruption is actually involved.
The FEC, therefore, has jurisdiction over this sort of stuff. And if one interprets parody anti-Bush sites as political advertising -- particularly if they are also pro-Gore, as some are IIRC -- then it is arguable that these are services essentially contributed to a campaign, and therefore should fall under the scope of the regulations. ISTR, in fact, that there was once a Slashdot story mentioning the FEC's stance regarding political statements online by third parties and the possible need to determine how much value was put into them.
In that sense, as long as political ads on television are constrained, perhaps political parody sites -- mostly set up to trash a candidate, and usually promote his main rival -- should be regulated too.
Precisely, which makes the concept that there's only so much money to go around patently bizarre.
Practical case --
Some years ago, Brazillian banks paid 1% interest per day for savings accounts; they had to offer this, just to keep up with inflation. Anybody who claims that can happen, while suggesting that the money supply is in fact largely static, is either claiming that demand for goods was, strangely, increasing a corresponding amount in general (and thus driving up prices), or that there was a general conspiracy to raise prices across all sectors of the economy, (which seems just as weird), or that the Brazillians were just being completely wacky (ditto).
The only plausible way to account for that was that the money supply was increasing, essentially devaluing the currency and forcing people to exchange greater and greater amounts (in absolute terms, not necessarily relative to value) for the same goods.
Value is created. Just because Mr. Ellison may have tens of billions of dollars doesn't mean that others have lost tens of billions of dollars that they'll never recover; they in turn create goods and perform services with their own intrinsic value. Economics isn't zero-sum no matter what a fringe may believe.
Riddle me this:
If money and value are conserved, then how does the Treasury Department and the banking system increase the money supply, and why is it possible to have inflation that increases far faster than population growth and any possible demand could outstrip supply?
.
Juries can't be biased? Hrmmmm.
How about
racially motivated nullification?
Or the time and effort spent on jury consulting? It's done for a reason -- because jurors DO bring biases, and some of them are fairly predictable based on things like social class, race, gender and so forth. The evidence ranges from presentation details (dress the defendant in a suit -- which SHOULDN'T matter to an unbiased jury deciding solely on points of fact and law) to peremptory challenges based on probable biases and so forth.
Jurors are people. People are biased. You can't escape that.
But doesn't appear that anything will change.
Odd comment, considering that either MSFT gets broken up (which sends a pretty strong message to business, and should make companies think twice about imitating them), or the DOJ and the states get smacked (which sends a pretty strong message to DAs and the DOJ about the standards required for sustaining an anti-trust case). Either way, something's going to change.
And, even if somebody believes that Bush would be sufficiently pro-MSFT and brazen enough to pull the DOJ off the case -- which seems unlikely given its high profile -- don't forget that there are plenty of states in on the case that wouldn't drop. Remember the Big Tobacco settlement? The Feds weren't really involved on the plaintiff's side until they smelled money; it was pretty much all handled by the states.
Everything ranging from possessing a long gun (even many semi-automatics are banned in NYC... although hunting rifles are rarely used for urban crime) to, say, kissing without asking for permission (IIRC, a ban was proposed as part of an Amherst U. policy on sexual harrassment), to smoking in a public place (illegal in many more liberal areas), and so forth.
*blink*
A really devious person might try to figure out whether there's any way to sneak a trojan in -- e.g. depending on how thorough they are, such as flashing the BIOS, etc.
The terrorist angle seems more a problem for the CIA and friends (Mossad, arguably FSB -- I doubt that Russia's activities in Chechnya have won them any friends among, say, Islamic Jihad and friends, the various British organizations..) than NMD.
Terrorists could use a missile, true. But -- on what vehicle? A fixed silo can be guarded rather heavily, and in turn is a fixed target... but a submarine is designed to be able to operate rather stealthily independently for long periods at a time. And a submarine could perhaps get fairly close to a US (or Israeli, or Russian, or British) coast, which should probably result in a faster transit time to target and a smaller -- perhaps a completely impractical -- window for interception. So there's a case to be made that it's far more efficient to focus on infiltration and prevention, in the case of subversion.
The NMD case seems stronger against the possibility of nations that aren't easily deterred. For instance, Iraqi agents were, if memory serves, at one time arrested while plotting to assassinate former President Bush. Obviously, such a (perhaps useless; he was, after all, _former_) reckless act would lead to reprisals... but apparently, he didn't care. He also shows no particular regard for his civillian population, or in fact for most of his military. So somebody like him might indeed be tempted to launch, if he had one, regardless of US response. And for such a scenario NMD makes sense.
Right on regarding the power -- if they can figure out how and when to intercept. For now, that's a very big if.
The terrorist scenario is a good motivation for boosting the assets of the CIA and FBI for their investigative roles; the primary way of stopping such operations is infiltration and espionage beforehand since you can't possibly search all transport methods. You can, however, take advantage of the fact that people talk, and can also be pressured. Especially with the help of our allies; I have no doubt that the Mossad, for instance, would try very hard if they learned that, say, Hezbollah obtained a nuclear warhead -- and they've been less politically hamstrung than our own agencies.
And another one --
GRU[*] Col. Oleg Penkovsky, an asset run by both the British and the Americans, passed along such valuable documents as the missile site construction plans early on, allowing them to figure out what exactly was being built on Cuba. In 1962, he was arrested by the KGB, and presumably interrogated and executed...
Source -- Andrew, Christopher. "The Sword and the Shield", Basic Books, 1999.
[*] Soviet military intelligence, which made him a VERY useful asset until he was caught.
How about the possibility of a rogue submarine equipped with ICBMs? A single sub can carry many, perhaps with multiple warheads, and everything needed for launching; and I'd be surprised if the Russians either a) disarmed all their submarines, or b) pay them extremely well (enough, say, to completely prevent bribery... or other means of coercion, like threats against family) given their perpetual fiscal problems.
You can't effectively retalliate if you can't even identify, let alone find, your attacker. It also makes it harder to assess the magnitude of the potential threat. It may not mean the End of the World, but it's great for blackmail. And what if two subs were subverted... and then Moscow and D.C. both were hit? The responses might be... interesting.
And it's akin to IP. You don't really have a right to dictate to a content provider whether or not they choose ads, barring a contract granting you those rights. You have no "right" to force, say, Yahoo!, to stop airing ads; they're the content provider, not you. They were never even obligated to create the site, let alone follow your specifications.
You're free to design your own ad-free portal serving e-mail and other services to hundreds of thousands at your own leisure. You can ask it of Yahoo!. But you have no right to compel them, any more than they can compel you to visit their site.
For now, you're legally free to block their ads via proxies and so forth, or even editing the source of a free browser and using that. But Yahoo!'s owners -- its shareholders -- have the final say on whether or not ads will be there.
Why not blame 'em all?
Napster, 'coz a) it's actively providing a search service, and thus you can argue that they're negligent in not providing barriers there, b) that they have been, from Day 1, aware that they would have this problem (according to internal memos, IIRC), that it would be *endemic*, and that they chose to pretty much ignore it -- fully aware that mass infringement would raise their profile and customer base.
The users doing the unauthorized uploading, because they're infringing on copyrights.
The users doing the unauthorized downloading (in most cases, knowingly I'd think...), because they're infringing.
What, trial by combat in, say, Thunderdome?
Two men enter, one man leaves!
Maybe because Prodigy is in serious trouble -- losing 90% of your market cap in a year is painful. Perhaps Prodigy can't afford to divert that much time and money to defending a patent suit?
The Memex idea may also be worth mentioning.
It'll be bad if BT offers, and Prodigy accepts, a settlement that's relatively cheap compared to the legal expense of fighting it, and if BT then offered the same deal to others.
IF the company states that. And your mod doesn't infringe on anybody else's rights -- both the rights holders of the game for which the mod works, and the rights holders of any other IP you use. An X-Files mod for Quake would need to be possible under licensing from both Fox and id Software. This is regardless of whatever effect, or lack of effect, your mod has on either company. And many companies don't grant these rights by default...
If the game maker is also in the business of extending the game -- like offering a registered version with more levels than a full version, or making agreements to license level collections -- then making a mod and distributing it without their authorization is hurting them.
Some vendors do billing address verification now, methinks -- so you have to guess the card number, usually expiration date, *and* billing address all correct. That's a much greater number of bits in the combination.
Client-side cookie.
So use a Tcl/Tk script that simply execs CLI programs.
You can put a GUI on top of many CLIs; you'll probably lose pipes unless you've got a darn GOOD GUI system, but it'll work. Take user adding/removing, for instance; on many Linux distros, you can use control-panel-type utilities to do this -- but you can still use a text editor or Perl script, because the GUI's merely a front-end.
You generally can't trivally make a CLI out of a GUI if the GUI author didn't give you one.
Windows can be very finicky when it comes to hardware.
I've seen plain-Jane machines that deterministically crashed when NT4 did its peripheral scanning during installation, baffling the local tech support. This, as it happens, was while working at a certain large software company in Redmond, WA.
It'd still be forgery. Hell, it'd be the same offense if he were hijacking a site run by Cyberpromo at the height of Sanford Wallace's spamming days, regardless of whatever MSFT and Cyberpromo have done.