I understand your point, however spelling it out that way will get you nowhere in a court, or board room. The sooner you stop treating them like they're evil, the more responsive they're going to be to your ideas. I agree with you completely, but you have to put things in a business context. They didn't go to war with their customers in their eyes, they used their legal right to sue people who they believed were violating their rights. Their rights are violated, so they sued. Because of it, consumer rights are getting violated. This is making their customers even less likely to buy their music. Its a bad situation for everyone. So, how do we improve things? Compromise. They get a harsh reminder that they can't survive without us, and evolve to take advantage of new business models which will spur them out ahead of their competition. We get to enjoy our media on different platforms (like EMI's drm free music). Everyone wins. They just have to be willing to accept their business model is outdated, and going to cost them their shirts if they don't evolve.
I think a common misconception on/. is the idea that the recording industry is explicitly trying to attack "us." They're not. They are legal entities who are trying to defend themselves, and their profit margins. They aren't bad guys, they're just trying to get themselves the best deal they can - and they have money, time, and power to fight for it much more than most Americans do. However, we're the consumers. Ultimately, they can't survive without us. So instead of viewing them as an opponent, view them as a seperate group of people with whom we need to reach an accord. The fact is, the amount of money being made from the lawsuits is paltry compared to the amount of money spent pursuing file sharers, not to mention the almost weekly egg on their faces for charging the deceased, 5 year olds, and little old grandmothers. I honestly don't see this as a card they're playing, I think they're realizing that if you piss off your consumers, your company is gone. Acting like the gestapo is a surefire way to NOT win loyalty. Not to mention the whole RIAA thing has basically made a ton of consumers start rejecting mainstream media. Outside Philadelphia we now have an Indie radio station which is completely fan run, and its growing in leaps and bounds because they allow local colleges to share their airwaves. I don't think this is a trick, I see it as good business on their part. Ultimately, their big concern is their bottom line, not eliminating your rights. Hopefully the other labels start realizing this fact, and then we can all get back to living our lives again.
My 'flawed' understanding is based on living in the region for 4 years, working in Palastinian refugee camps for the UN. The caste system is unofficial. Keeping people "seperate but equal" equates to just as much. When Britain devided the then-mandate Palastine to make room for Israel, they did not remove all of those who were living there. As Israel expanded, it forced most out, however some were able to remain (hence the name Palastinian Israeli - a person of Palastinian descent living as a citizen of Israel). These people must recieve passes to proceed into certain areas (which change daily, making it possible for someone to leave home and literally never be permitted to return), and are subject to numerous restrictions that the Israeli settlers are not subject to. 4+ hour waits at checkpoints are common, and also hold up ambulances (something Israel has been attacked for on the world stage by groups such as Amnesty International, and is also illegal under international law) based solely on factors which essentially are based on an unofficial caste system. Certainn citizens are given the highest regard, given no restriction when passing through checkpoints (Israeli settlers). Palastinian Israelis are in the middle (permitted to enter and exit Israel after long delays at checkpoints, subject to access certain areas of cities based solely on permits - basically imagine a hall pass you'd need to be allowed to return to your home, or visit a friend), and Palastinians who have not assumed Israeli citizenship on the bottom (basically relegated to living in refugee camps). An equal protection clause means nothing if it is not followed. If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck... its most likely a duck. Feel free to search youtube for things like "israel ambulance checkpoint" and you'll see how the facade of human rights that makes it through the censors is very, very different from the real story.
Israel as a country is less than 100 years old (barely 50 years old actually). After WWII the British and Americans basically took land from Palastine and said "Ok, we declare this Israel." The original Zionist settlers went into that area. However they refused to stay within the alloted borders and began forcefully removing peoples who were living in bordering areas. This led to a UN Resolution in 1967 which basically stated that Israel was not permitted to expand beyond its current borders. Israel to this day has not listened to this, and any time any sort of reprimand hits the floor in the UN it is veto'd by the US government's UN Security Council veto. I was not talking about "settlers" being removed at gunpoint, the settlers are the ones doing the removing. All in all, a country with as little concern about human rights as Israel, who basically imposes a caste system (for instance, people are color coded according to license plates on their vehicles, only certain colors are allowed through checkpoints, others are only allowed in certain sections of cities, etc), I don't see caring too much for things like search and seizure laws. It doesn't appear to be their style. Also, that article could have been heavily edited because any sort of documentation that goes to any major media outlet is exposed to Israeli military censorship at two levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor). For all we know, Google could have been ordered at gunpoint to hand over the records, and the world would never know because it would have to pass the censor first. There is a reason why almost all media in the US paints Israel in a positive light. In summary, I don't claim to be an armchair lawyer, but I don't seem to think that such a hostile country would be prone to giving its populace rights to searches and seizures.
Its always better to err on the side of caution with this stuff. You may want to notify your lead one on one that you found it. That way you're not going over his head, and you're being a man about stuff. The big concern for me wouldn't be the guy who posted it on a forum, it would be the question in my head about where he got the code before that. Was it his home brewed code? Maybe he swiped it from an O'Reilly cookbook? Maybe he was unscrupulous and swiped it from a website who had clearly noted that their code was not allowed for use.
You don't know, making you assume one way or another. Sadly, assumption is the mother of all f*ckups.
Now, another possibility is to post a response in the forum asking whether or not you can spoon in the code, or for a license clarification (if its a more recent post).
I have to wonder about Israeli law. See, everyone is looking at this stating "there was no court order." Well, does Israeli law stipulate you need a court order? Given that the Israelis are prone to forcefully remove people from their homes at gunpoint for the sake of zionist colonization, and are also known to organize their citizens in what could be considered a caste system (Israeli colonists at the top, Palastinian Israelis at the middle, Palastinians at the very bottom), I don't think they'd care too much about court orders.
This is really cool actually.
My guess would be high wind, tied with a low friction surface. Long flat stretches of land tend to equate to massively strong winds.
The ground is bone dry, so I'd guess that adding water is going to first add a layer of water that the rock would travel on, and not so much the ground itself. As the water begins to soak into the ground the rock will face more and more resistance because its traveling on progressively more silt and clay than water. Has anyone seen any arial photos of these guys? If something like this was the case the trail they carve into the ground would start off extremely shallow and get progressively deeper as it travels.
Also, maybe brine shrimp have something to do with it? Crazy I know, but under a rock would be a cool place to keep eggs, and the addition of water tends to bring flats alive.
The actual blast may not have killed that many people in Hiroshima, however, the radioactive fallout, black rain, and lingering radiation have caused at least 30,000 people to die. Not to mention the hard to ascertain numbers of people who went homeless and starved to death.
On top of that, if radiation was not deadly, why did the men who were sent into Chernobyl to shut down the reactor core never come back alive?
So, since you don't have to pay for packaging, a physical disc, or any manuals, inserts, or other crap, or any of the other stuff that goes with it (like royalties for artists, production costs for any of the above, silk printing), the games bought online are going to be a whole bunch cheaper, right?...Right?
Yep, this sucks, but at least the money is being used on important stuff, like making sure Bush and Cheney don't go homeless. And to make sure we can keep spending 80 billion a year on Iraq. And spending more than 5 billion a year to fund Haliburton in Iraq (without any government auditing).
I mean, really, who cares about science when TERRORISTS ARE OUT TO GET US!!!!
As mentioned above, its not hard to create your own backup solution. If you've got a fat pipe, there are plenty of online backup solutions you can use to keep your data safe. If you're looking for hardware, the WD Mybook drives come with software to automate backing up of data.
If you want a true NAS, the cheapest units I know of are available from www.iomega.com but they're mostly based on windows raid - an anyone who's worked in a datacenter knows that windows raid = chancey at best.
CDW sells HP DL100 NAS units, and DL320 NAS units for pretty cheap (the 100 I believe sells for about 700$, though I could be wrong).
Google "cheap nas" and see what you can come up with. You're looking mostly for a BBWC (battery backed write cache) so your data doesn't get lost, and nice fast drives. Stay away from IDE raids, they're slow, and prone to errors.
Oh, if your mbr gets horked again, just boot into a bootdisk and do fdisk/mbr. Your problems should be solved.
So I started using the beta yesterday, and I can say that I won't be going back to IE or FF2. It runs extremely fast, stable, and is nice and polished. It seriously reminds me of the early releases of FF, but much, much faster. I've got about 14 tabs open right now, and its still running screaming fast. The earlier/. article is no lie, it installs in a heartbeat, opens fast, closes fast, even browses fast (as would be assumed given that it uses a smaller memory footprint, though I could be wrong about that). I reccomend.
Hey look, a 50 year old rocker with no career has an opinion! Apparently he was so busy with his opinions that not only did he not pay attention to facts, but he managed to convince me that every bit of rebellious fun that was KISS's music is worthless tripe worthy of getting nuked off my PC.
Grats Gene, not only did you make yourself look like a complete tool, but you lost a fan. Pathetic washed up hack.
Other "conspiracy nut" factoids:
-For the few weeks prior to the event workers at the WTC claim that they saw an increased number of goverment agents in the building, including a massive surge of security near the basement levels of the buildings.
-Forensic architects and demolitions experts found traces of thermite, attributing to how the steel lost its structural integrity. Thermite is not contained in planes, it is placed in demolition charges.
-The "official" story of how the buildings fell (plane impact, ignited jet fuel) cannot be recreated in a lab. However a thermite demolition can recreate how the buildings fell exactly.
-The head of security for the WTC was a relative of George Bush.
-Within 48 hours of the event a massive order for arms production and body bags was placed in companies owned by the Carlisle Group, a company in which the Bush family had substantial stakes in. The Bin Laden family were also investors.
Need we go on?
Yeah, because theres nothing wrong with the concept of having to sneak into PUBLIC buildings where PUBLIC OFFICIALS have their meetings after being elected by their PUBLIC. If you can't immediately see whats wrong with that idea, then you should go move to some country like Sierra Leone because you have no goddamned idea what it means to live in a democracy, a nation OF THE PEOPLE.
Hmm, typical zealous response:eyeroll:
No one was trying to push an agenda, I was simply referring to the keystone study that most anti-drug groups were using as a basis for their argument, and that it had been retracted only 2-3 months after being published. That has nothing to do with an agenda, so really, who is off topic? The fact is, zealots won't care whether the study has been retracted or not. Retraction won't remove it from scholarly journal databases. People often won't check for retractions, especially not when they're trying to use it as propaganda. So please, stop getting all defensive and completely missing the point in the process. If you want to push things, you could also examine the LaGuardia Report on Cannabis Usage, which was funded by New York, and was rejected by the government because it didn't match their preconceptions. The fact is, zealots consistantly ignore anything which doesn't push their propaganda, including retractions.
Cheers to the good professor who is caring more about science as a whole than public embarrassment. Sadly I'm not sure how much this is going to do - zealots are notorious for quoting studies far after they're retracted (for instance the original study which claimed MDMA caused brain damage was retracted two months later after it was discovered that the chemical administered to lab animals was pure methamphetamine, and not MDMA - yet the study is still cited by watchdog groups and the DEA). Your average reader isn't going to bother checking citations either.
Sad:(
But wait, I thought the pubbies kept saying that they're only watching people who need to be watched, and are sticking to the law!? You mean the government is lying? I can't believe that! No way! I wish I knew why the heck people can't dig their heads out of the sand and realize what the hell is going on... do people just not realize how perilously close we are to living in the orwellian future forecast by 1984? Cameras are everywhere in the UK and soon in the US, unmanned spyplanes doing thousands of runs per day over our countries, arrests being made based on information garnered from satellites, every conversation is being monitored, people are being held without habeas corpus because the governments are creating black-bagging legal grey areas, fighting a war that can't possibly be won and using it as an attempt to unify and pacify your body-politic... its terrifying. Yet it seems like only a few people realize it. I just want my free frontal lobotomy so I don't have to care about it anymore.
This passage seems strangely appropriate... "there was madness in any direction, at any hour... You
could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that. Our energy would simply `prevail'. There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back."
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
That's false. The purpose of the supreme court is to interpret the constitution's meaning as it applies to cases which the court feels need clarification. This is why not all cases are accepted by the supreme court. Congress and the President are bound by their interpretations.
Case:
Katz v. US, 1967. Excerpt, " join the opinion of the Court, which I read to hold only (a) that an enclosed telephone booth is an area where, like a home, Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, and unlike a field, Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57, a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy; (b) that electronic, as well as physical, intrusion into a place that is in this sense private may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, [p361] and (c) that the invasion of a constitutionally protected area by federal authorities is, as the Court has long held, presumptively unreasonable in the absence of a search warrant.
As the Court's opinion states, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places." The question, however, is what protection it affords to those people. Generally, as here, the answer to that question requires reference to a "place." My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus, a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected," because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable. Cf. Hester v. United States, supra. "
Actually people are provided privacy by the constitution in any situation where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For instance, if I close the door on a pay telephone booth, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This was ruled by the supreme court because the constitution is meant to protect privacy of people, not specific places and channels. So if I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, any information gathered while I have said expectation is unconstitutional. Let me see if I can find the case law on that.. been forever since civil liberties class.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your point, however spelling it out that way will get you nowhere in a court, or board room. The sooner you stop treating them like they're evil, the more responsive they're going to be to your ideas. I agree with you completely, but you have to put things in a business context. They didn't go to war with their customers in their eyes, they used their legal right to sue people who they believed were violating their rights. Their rights are violated, so they sued. Because of it, consumer rights are getting violated. This is making their customers even less likely to buy their music. Its a bad situation for everyone. So, how do we improve things? Compromise. They get a harsh reminder that they can't survive without us, and evolve to take advantage of new business models which will spur them out ahead of their competition. We get to enjoy our media on different platforms (like EMI's drm free music). Everyone wins. They just have to be willing to accept their business model is outdated, and going to cost them their shirts if they don't evolve.
I think a common misconception on /. is the idea that the recording industry is explicitly trying to attack "us." They're not. They are legal entities who are trying to defend themselves, and their profit margins. They aren't bad guys, they're just trying to get themselves the best deal they can - and they have money, time, and power to fight for it much more than most Americans do. However, we're the consumers. Ultimately, they can't survive without us. So instead of viewing them as an opponent, view them as a seperate group of people with whom we need to reach an accord. The fact is, the amount of money being made from the lawsuits is paltry compared to the amount of money spent pursuing file sharers, not to mention the almost weekly egg on their faces for charging the deceased, 5 year olds, and little old grandmothers. I honestly don't see this as a card they're playing, I think they're realizing that if you piss off your consumers, your company is gone. Acting like the gestapo is a surefire way to NOT win loyalty. Not to mention the whole RIAA thing has basically made a ton of consumers start rejecting mainstream media. Outside Philadelphia we now have an Indie radio station which is completely fan run, and its growing in leaps and bounds because they allow local colleges to share their airwaves. I don't think this is a trick, I see it as good business on their part. Ultimately, their big concern is their bottom line, not eliminating your rights. Hopefully the other labels start realizing this fact, and then we can all get back to living our lives again.
My 'flawed' understanding is based on living in the region for 4 years, working in Palastinian refugee camps for the UN. The caste system is unofficial. Keeping people "seperate but equal" equates to just as much. When Britain devided the then-mandate Palastine to make room for Israel, they did not remove all of those who were living there. As Israel expanded, it forced most out, however some were able to remain (hence the name Palastinian Israeli - a person of Palastinian descent living as a citizen of Israel). These people must recieve passes to proceed into certain areas (which change daily, making it possible for someone to leave home and literally never be permitted to return), and are subject to numerous restrictions that the Israeli settlers are not subject to. 4+ hour waits at checkpoints are common, and also hold up ambulances (something Israel has been attacked for on the world stage by groups such as Amnesty International, and is also illegal under international law) based solely on factors which essentially are based on an unofficial caste system. Certainn citizens are given the highest regard, given no restriction when passing through checkpoints (Israeli settlers). Palastinian Israelis are in the middle (permitted to enter and exit Israel after long delays at checkpoints, subject to access certain areas of cities based solely on permits - basically imagine a hall pass you'd need to be allowed to return to your home, or visit a friend), and Palastinians who have not assumed Israeli citizenship on the bottom (basically relegated to living in refugee camps). An equal protection clause means nothing if it is not followed. If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck... its most likely a duck. Feel free to search youtube for things like "israel ambulance checkpoint" and you'll see how the facade of human rights that makes it through the censors is very, very different from the real story.
Israel as a country is less than 100 years old (barely 50 years old actually). After WWII the British and Americans basically took land from Palastine and said "Ok, we declare this Israel." The original Zionist settlers went into that area. However they refused to stay within the alloted borders and began forcefully removing peoples who were living in bordering areas. This led to a UN Resolution in 1967 which basically stated that Israel was not permitted to expand beyond its current borders. Israel to this day has not listened to this, and any time any sort of reprimand hits the floor in the UN it is veto'd by the US government's UN Security Council veto. I was not talking about "settlers" being removed at gunpoint, the settlers are the ones doing the removing. All in all, a country with as little concern about human rights as Israel, who basically imposes a caste system (for instance, people are color coded according to license plates on their vehicles, only certain colors are allowed through checkpoints, others are only allowed in certain sections of cities, etc), I don't see caring too much for things like search and seizure laws. It doesn't appear to be their style. Also, that article could have been heavily edited because any sort of documentation that goes to any major media outlet is exposed to Israeli military censorship at two levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor). For all we know, Google could have been ordered at gunpoint to hand over the records, and the world would never know because it would have to pass the censor first. There is a reason why almost all media in the US paints Israel in a positive light. In summary, I don't claim to be an armchair lawyer, but I don't seem to think that such a hostile country would be prone to giving its populace rights to searches and seizures.
Its always better to err on the side of caution with this stuff. You may want to notify your lead one on one that you found it. That way you're not going over his head, and you're being a man about stuff. The big concern for me wouldn't be the guy who posted it on a forum, it would be the question in my head about where he got the code before that. Was it his home brewed code? Maybe he swiped it from an O'Reilly cookbook? Maybe he was unscrupulous and swiped it from a website who had clearly noted that their code was not allowed for use. You don't know, making you assume one way or another. Sadly, assumption is the mother of all f*ckups. Now, another possibility is to post a response in the forum asking whether or not you can spoon in the code, or for a license clarification (if its a more recent post).
I have to wonder about Israeli law. See, everyone is looking at this stating "there was no court order." Well, does Israeli law stipulate you need a court order? Given that the Israelis are prone to forcefully remove people from their homes at gunpoint for the sake of zionist colonization, and are also known to organize their citizens in what could be considered a caste system (Israeli colonists at the top, Palastinian Israelis at the middle, Palastinians at the very bottom), I don't think they'd care too much about court orders.
This is really cool actually. My guess would be high wind, tied with a low friction surface. Long flat stretches of land tend to equate to massively strong winds. The ground is bone dry, so I'd guess that adding water is going to first add a layer of water that the rock would travel on, and not so much the ground itself. As the water begins to soak into the ground the rock will face more and more resistance because its traveling on progressively more silt and clay than water. Has anyone seen any arial photos of these guys? If something like this was the case the trail they carve into the ground would start off extremely shallow and get progressively deeper as it travels. Also, maybe brine shrimp have something to do with it? Crazy I know, but under a rock would be a cool place to keep eggs, and the addition of water tends to bring flats alive.
The actual blast may not have killed that many people in Hiroshima, however, the radioactive fallout, black rain, and lingering radiation have caused at least 30,000 people to die. Not to mention the hard to ascertain numbers of people who went homeless and starved to death. On top of that, if radiation was not deadly, why did the men who were sent into Chernobyl to shut down the reactor core never come back alive?
So, since you don't have to pay for packaging, a physical disc, or any manuals, inserts, or other crap, or any of the other stuff that goes with it (like royalties for artists, production costs for any of the above, silk printing), the games bought online are going to be a whole bunch cheaper, right? ...Right?
Yep, this sucks, but at least the money is being used on important stuff, like making sure Bush and Cheney don't go homeless. And to make sure we can keep spending 80 billion a year on Iraq. And spending more than 5 billion a year to fund Haliburton in Iraq (without any government auditing). I mean, really, who cares about science when TERRORISTS ARE OUT TO GET US!!!!
As mentioned above, its not hard to create your own backup solution. If you've got a fat pipe, there are plenty of online backup solutions you can use to keep your data safe. If you're looking for hardware, the WD Mybook drives come with software to automate backing up of data. If you want a true NAS, the cheapest units I know of are available from www.iomega.com but they're mostly based on windows raid - an anyone who's worked in a datacenter knows that windows raid = chancey at best. CDW sells HP DL100 NAS units, and DL320 NAS units for pretty cheap (the 100 I believe sells for about 700$, though I could be wrong). Google "cheap nas" and see what you can come up with. You're looking mostly for a BBWC (battery backed write cache) so your data doesn't get lost, and nice fast drives. Stay away from IDE raids, they're slow, and prone to errors. Oh, if your mbr gets horked again, just boot into a bootdisk and do fdisk /mbr. Your problems should be solved.
So I started using the beta yesterday, and I can say that I won't be going back to IE or FF2. It runs extremely fast, stable, and is nice and polished. It seriously reminds me of the early releases of FF, but much, much faster. I've got about 14 tabs open right now, and its still running screaming fast. The earlier /. article is no lie, it installs in a heartbeat, opens fast, closes fast, even browses fast (as would be assumed given that it uses a smaller memory footprint, though I could be wrong about that). I reccomend.
In that case I'll give it 3 months before they print a retraction :)
Kidding, kidding.
Hey look, a 50 year old rocker with no career has an opinion! Apparently he was so busy with his opinions that not only did he not pay attention to facts, but he managed to convince me that every bit of rebellious fun that was KISS's music is worthless tripe worthy of getting nuked off my PC. Grats Gene, not only did you make yourself look like a complete tool, but you lost a fan. Pathetic washed up hack.
Other "conspiracy nut" factoids:
-For the few weeks prior to the event workers at the WTC claim that they saw an increased number of goverment agents in the building, including a massive surge of security near the basement levels of the buildings.
-Forensic architects and demolitions experts found traces of thermite, attributing to how the steel lost its structural integrity. Thermite is not contained in planes, it is placed in demolition charges.
-The "official" story of how the buildings fell (plane impact, ignited jet fuel) cannot be recreated in a lab. However a thermite demolition can recreate how the buildings fell exactly.
-The head of security for the WTC was a relative of George Bush.
-Within 48 hours of the event a massive order for arms production and body bags was placed in companies owned by the Carlisle Group, a company in which the Bush family had substantial stakes in. The Bin Laden family were also investors.
Need we go on?
Yeah, because theres nothing wrong with the concept of having to sneak into PUBLIC buildings where PUBLIC OFFICIALS have their meetings after being elected by their PUBLIC. If you can't immediately see whats wrong with that idea, then you should go move to some country like Sierra Leone because you have no goddamned idea what it means to live in a democracy, a nation OF THE PEOPLE.
Citation for your facts please, or else I call shennanigans. Kthxbai.
Hmm, typical zealous response :eyeroll:
No one was trying to push an agenda, I was simply referring to the keystone study that most anti-drug groups were using as a basis for their argument, and that it had been retracted only 2-3 months after being published. That has nothing to do with an agenda, so really, who is off topic? The fact is, zealots won't care whether the study has been retracted or not. Retraction won't remove it from scholarly journal databases. People often won't check for retractions, especially not when they're trying to use it as propaganda. So please, stop getting all defensive and completely missing the point in the process. If you want to push things, you could also examine the LaGuardia Report on Cannabis Usage, which was funded by New York, and was rejected by the government because it didn't match their preconceptions. The fact is, zealots consistantly ignore anything which doesn't push their propaganda, including retractions.
Cheers to the good professor who is caring more about science as a whole than public embarrassment. Sadly I'm not sure how much this is going to do - zealots are notorious for quoting studies far after they're retracted (for instance the original study which claimed MDMA caused brain damage was retracted two months later after it was discovered that the chemical administered to lab animals was pure methamphetamine, and not MDMA - yet the study is still cited by watchdog groups and the DEA). Your average reader isn't going to bother checking citations either. Sad :(
But wait, I thought the pubbies kept saying that they're only watching people who need to be watched, and are sticking to the law!? You mean the government is lying? I can't believe that! No way! I wish I knew why the heck people can't dig their heads out of the sand and realize what the hell is going on... do people just not realize how perilously close we are to living in the orwellian future forecast by 1984? Cameras are everywhere in the UK and soon in the US, unmanned spyplanes doing thousands of runs per day over our countries, arrests being made based on information garnered from satellites, every conversation is being monitored, people are being held without habeas corpus because the governments are creating black-bagging legal grey areas, fighting a war that can't possibly be won and using it as an attempt to unify and pacify your body-politic... its terrifying. Yet it seems like only a few people realize it. I just want my free frontal lobotomy so I don't have to care about it anymore.
I can honestly say I like the Prada phone more than the iphone. And its not a pain to unlock either.
This passage seems strangely appropriate... ... You
could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ...
And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that. Our energy would simply `prevail'. There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back."
"there was madness in any direction, at any hour
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
That's false. The purpose of the supreme court is to interpret the constitution's meaning as it applies to cases which the court feels need clarification. This is why not all cases are accepted by the supreme court. Congress and the President are bound by their interpretations.
Case: Katz v. US, 1967. Excerpt, " join the opinion of the Court, which I read to hold only (a) that an enclosed telephone booth is an area where, like a home, Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, and unlike a field, Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57, a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy; (b) that electronic, as well as physical, intrusion into a place that is in this sense private may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, [p361] and (c) that the invasion of a constitutionally protected area by federal authorities is, as the Court has long held, presumptively unreasonable in the absence of a search warrant. As the Court's opinion states, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places." The question, however, is what protection it affords to those people. Generally, as here, the answer to that question requires reference to a "place." My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus, a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected," because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable. Cf. Hester v. United States, supra. "
Actually people are provided privacy by the constitution in any situation where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For instance, if I close the door on a pay telephone booth, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This was ruled by the supreme court because the constitution is meant to protect privacy of people, not specific places and channels. So if I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, any information gathered while I have said expectation is unconstitutional. Let me see if I can find the case law on that.. been forever since civil liberties class.