O'Connor and Rhenquist opposed the property rights decision dumbass.
No shit. Read what I said. That's my point: the Supreme Court made the property rights decision despite the presence of Rhenquist and O'Connor. With them gone and two new Republican/corporate stooges in their place, decisions such as the property rights decision will receive much stronger backing from the Court.
In short, instead of such decisions being somewhat uncertain as they have in the past, they will be very clear, and strongly in favor of corporate interests and control (if only because you can bank on Bush and Congress making sure that whoever they nominate is highly vulnerable to being controlled by their corporate masters -- their corporate masters will demand nothing less).
And that is why I have little doubt that the future Supreme Court will uphold the 9th Circuit Court's decision we're discussing now.
The 9th circuit decisions are some of the most overturned in the history of our nation. Seriously, the judges appointed there are completely out of touch with reality, and this will likely be another case that bites it. I wouldn't worry.
Since Rhenquist is gone and O'Connor has retired, and the entire Congress is controlled by the Republicans, Bush will almost certainly put a couple of Republican/corporate stooges on the Supreme Court.
So I would worry about this ruling being upheld by the Supreme Court.
I mean, they did rule that local governments can sieze property on behalf of large corporate interests whenever they want, and they did (in essence) rule that an infinite number of copyright term extensions are in fact legal as long as each extension is itself finite, and those were before Rhenquist died (and perhaps even before O'Connor retired).
No, I fully expect this ruling to be upheld by the Supreme Court, because it gives greater control to the corporations.
The maker of a product has no right to prohibit you from using it in a different way than intended.
When it comes to computer software, yes, they do have a right. And they have cases like this and more to prosecute people who use their software in ways they don't allow for whatever reason they want to give.
No, they do not have the right to prohibit you from using their product in a way they didn't intend.
Copyright gives you exclusive right to distribute your work. That is all. Anything beyond that is not covered by copyright, and certainly is not covered by the clause in the Constitution which covers copyright.
Because otherwise, the same restrictions could be applied to anything that has a copyright associated with it: books, magazines, articles, and even this message.
Just think of the things copyright holders could do if the EULA were to be applied to more traditional forms of copyrighted works. They could, for instance, forbid the sale of the work (thus circumventing first-sale laws). They could stipulate that libraries are not allowed to keep a copy of the work in question, thus effectively shutting down libraries if enough publishers did that.
If EULAs cannot be applied to non-software, why should they be valid for software?
Nobody wants to work on the mainframe systems anymore because it "isn't cool." It's not the perceived latest and greatest.
See, this is an attitude that I don't understand.
I mean, look at the characteristics of modern mainframes:
Everything is fault tolerant and essentially hot-swappable. I mean everything.
The I/O throughput is gigantic. Well beyond almost everything else out there.
The hardware has been virtualized from the very beginning. Hell, even today you can't do true virtualization on Intel CPUs -- you have to resort to certain hacks like VMWare does. It's why Xen can't run unmodified OSes, but will be able to once Intel releases CPUs that support native virtualization. The end result is that virtual machines are routinely used on mainframes.
What's not cool about that?
As long as you can continue to learn new and interesting things on the job (and remember, "new" is relative to the person learning things), why wouldn't you want to work with mainframes?
At the end of the day, a mainframe is just an extremely capable computing platform. With its virtualization capabilities, you can run the latest and greatest stuff on it (Linux of various flavors) *and* the old-school stuff all at the same time, all without interrupting production.
The primary reason mainframes aren't more popular than they are is that they're expensive. You pay for the throughput and uptime capabilities of the mainframe. But in this case, you get what you pay for. That's a big reason mainframes aren't dead and buried already.
Perhaps you should have offered to do it for something like 10 million dollars or so. Payable up front.
I mean, if they're not going to give you specifics of the job but demand you give them a specific dollar amount, then you should specify an amount that's enough to take care of you for the rest of your life, because you have to account for the possibility that the project will take that kind of time, right?
And hey, they have the right to refuse to take you up on it, so no harm done, right?
The look on their face is likely to be just as priceless regardless.:-)
Not strictly, no. It's marketing. Same thing, different name.
Remember: Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing firm.
You should never believe what a marketing firm says. Their purpose in life is to lie in whatever way necessary to get you to buy whatever they're trying to sell. They'll say anything and do anything, no matter how false or shallow. I need only point at the huge pile of advertisements that surround you to illustrate that. Not one of them gives you the straight scoop. Not a single one.
Just like every politician out there.
Marketing, like politics, is the antithesis of truth.
The other camp will lament that North America is falling behind. To the latter I say that it is not North America falling behind, but rather the rest of the world is catching up. That's inevitable and that's good.
For the rest of the world to catch up, they had to either accelerate to a higher development speed than the U.S. was maintaining, or the U.S. had to slow down its development speed. I don't see much evidence of the former, and plenty of evidence of the latter.
And that is the problem. There's no good reason for the U.S. to have slowed down its pace of technological development unless it has lost some fundamental spark that it once had.
Where did our legal right to privacy go? And why do governments have no respect for people's right to communicate over the internet? Like it is some second class method of communication.
Governments have no respect for people's right to communicate over the internet because they have no respect for people's right to communicate at all.
The only reason the wiretap laws for more traditional forms of communication have judicial protections built-in is that they were formulated and passed during a period of time when the members of the government generally cared about people's rights, at least a little.
Today governments don't give a crap about anybody's rights, because the people who are running them today don't care about anything but power and control. And they can get away with it, too, because they control all the guns of any consequence (the pathetic peashooters the civilians are allowed to have are no match for the real guns controlled by the military).
Governments across the world are figuring out that civilians have no real power anymore. It won't be long now until the world's transition to the kind of dystopia depicted in so many science fiction books is complete.
It appears the Soviet Union died because it was a bit ahead of its time, not because governments want to avoid becoming like it.
I'm telling you, the entire world's heading into the shitter.
Seriously. Can you name one place in the entire world where the freedom of the people is significantly improving? Iraq may be the only place where that's true, and I think most of us would agree that the "freedom" the people have there is more a matter of appearances than reality. I'm not here to debate about Iraq, though, so feel free to count it as an example of improving freedom in the world if you wish.
But I can name many more places where real freedom is heading into the gutter than where it's on the upswing.
...on any meaningful scale and of any meaningful kind, at least.
Modern governments are too interested in power and control over the population to allow people to be able to escape their grasp so easily and permanently.
Space is the last frontier. Modern governments will want to maintain tight control over who goes there and why, because space potentially goes well beyond their reach.
That's why I don't think we'll see any meaningful manned presence in space for a long, long time (much longer than a human lifetime, at least), unless it's strictly military or strictly dependent on earth for survival.
I think the only way it will stop is that they go too far, and there is some kind of revolution. Let's get on with it...
Revolution? When they (the governments) have all the guns (and really nasty ones at that)? Good luck, you're going to really, really need it.
And if you don't believe me, then name just one successful revolution in the last 50 years by the civilian population against a government with a modern military, when the civilian population didn't have a lot of external military aid.
What's Cisco supposed to do? Just blanket not sell to China Inc. (china essentially operates like a large corporation) just in case their kit is used for Evil(tm)?
What do you mean "just in case"? We're talking about a situation where Cisco knows their kit will be used for Evil(tm). And you're saying they should turn a blind eye to that as long as it's profitable?
So, I take it, that means that you believe that U.S. weapons manufacturers should sell weapons, including nuclear weapons, to terrorists? After all, why should the weapons manufacturers care who they're selling to as long as they can make a tidy profit off the deal, right?
And if the above bothers you, try substituting "China" for "terrorists" in the above. It's all the same, really.
If you disagree with the the scenario I described, then tell me how is it meaningfully different from the Cisco situation?
If a significant portion of Cisco shareholders expressed their dissatisfaction with human rights policy by selling their shares, the stock price would drop and the executives would notice.
But if you're selling your shares as a result of Cisco's human rights policies, who do you think is buying them? Right: someone who doesn't care about Cisco's human rights policies.
So if all the shareholders who care about this issue sold their Cisco stock, the end result afterwards is that none of the shareholders would care about the issue anymore. And since the corporation will claim to have a responsibility to its current shareholders, it will continue violating human rights as long as it's profitable to do so.
So by selling your Cisco stock, you're likely to make the problem worse. You have far more control (even if it's still miniscule) over Cisco as someone who actually owns Cisco stock than as someone who doesn't.
It's the business of business to make profit. If you want to save the world, join a non-profit and put your money and energy behind a cause. It's the job of a CEO to make money in any legal way he can. Period.
Really? Says who? You?
And that includes taking steps to change what is legal and what isn't, right? So you believe that it's the job of a CEO to do whatever it takes to make slavery legal, since that would clearly make it easier for him to make money, right?
No way. The business of business is to do whatever its owners and the society it exists in want it to do. Making money at the expense of the well-being of others may be your priority (and that of those who currently run so many corporations today), but no sane society would tolerate that behavior, much less condone it.
If the shareholders aren't the ones who the corporation should answer to, then who should it answer to? You can't simultaneously claim (a) that the corporation should maximize profit at the expense of everything else because of its responsibility to its shareholders and (b) that it doesn't have any responsibility to the same shareholders when they demand ethical behavior from it.
To attempt to make those claims simultaneously is to reveal your true beliefs on the matter: that corporations should be evil (for what is evil if not intentionally harming others for your own gain?). Since corporations are treated by the legal system as individuals (something that I'm sure you agree with), it obviously follows that you believe that individuals, too, should act the same way. In short, you appear to condone evil in general.
Sorry, but I don't. And neither do most people that I know.
Now, of course, you probably don't actually condone evil. But it's what logically follows from your apparent beliefs about corporations. In short, you appear to have an internal inconsistency in your belief system that you need to resolve.
But this is all happening in a supposedly competitive market. Where are the alternatives? The different forms of the same products?
Paying for a product or service is one thing. Being artificially constrained in the choices available because of collusion within the industry (which this most surely is) is another thing entirely. We are being forced to deal with the latter, and have no power to change it. Refusing to buy isn't sufficient in the face of a tightly controlled market. The whole point of a competitive market is to provide customers with choices and to keep the price of those choices affordable. For most of the things the grandparent article talks about, choices do not exist (where, for instance, are the movie theaters that do not show commercials prior to showing the same main features that the other theaters are showing?).
George Washington and crew lived during a time when the firepower of the average soldier and the firepower of the average armed civilian were about the same.
This ain't the 1700s anymore. Today, the average soldier has, after accounting for all of the conventional support weaponry indirectly at his disposal, a many hundreds to one advantage in firepower over the average armed civilian. When you factor in weapons of mass destruction, that advantage rises to tens or even hundreds of thousands to one.
And even in George's day, they still needed military help from the French to win. No power on the planet would be stupid enough to give military aid to a popular uprising against the U.S. government, lest they find a few nukes lobbed their direction.
If the power of the U.S. government is seriously challenged, that government will do whatever it takes to remain in power, even if it has to nuke its own civilian population (which it will do only if nothing else can work, of course). Such is the nature of all power-mad governments.
Name one single example after 9/11 where letters such as what you describe (and not accompanied by a check for $100,000) have made a real difference in the fight against a bill whose purpose was to give the federal government more power or to satisfy the desires of large corporations (in other words, a bill that the "representatives" want to pass despite the wishes of the people).
Any government that attempts to restrain the people inevitably fails.
Really?
Where in the world did you get this hopelessly naive viewpoint from?
The vast majority of governments throughout human history have been the type that restrains the people. Despotisms. Monarchies. Banana republics. It's only within the last couple of hundred years that we've seen a move towards individual empowerment. Now we're seeing a move away from it again.
And since the modern tools to subdue large populations can only be defended against by weapons that no individual can afford, the trend towards worldwide totalitarianism will inexorably accelerate, not slow down, until the entire world is a totalitarian state.
And once that happens, there will be no outside force to push it over. It'll topple on its own, eventually. Everything changes, given enough time. But it'll take thousands of years.
We need for this U.S. to turn in to a real police state, for all civil liberties to be eviscerated because its the only way the average American will remember that they had value, why they had value and why they were worth fighting for. American's have had it to easy for to long. They need to experience an old fashioned police state close up so they will remember why they are bad.
...and then?
Has it occurred to you that if the U.S. goes down this path, it's likely that most of the rest of the Western world will go down the same path? Europe is already well on its way with the way the E.U. is organized, with the U.K. leading the charge.
If that happens, then who is going to be around to overthrow them? No police state that I've ever heard of has been overthrown from within to be replaced by some sort of democratic government without significant outside influence, if not outright military intervention (the USSR is the closest to this, but it transitioned from a police state as a result of economic competition with the West). But that's exactly what would be required if the world falls into the darkness of fascism. And fall it will, if the current trends continue.
This guy got fired because the company he worked for disapproves of his beliefs.
You can get (and people have been) fired for doing things on your own time that the company doesn't like.
You can get (and people, like this guy, have been) fired for saying things on your own time that your company doesn't like.
Notice a common theme here? The common theme is that if you work for a company, that company owns you. You are their slave. In exchange for an ever decreasing amount of money for your time, you have to do everything they tell you and demonstrate that you believe everything they want you to believe.
And the government that keeps telling you that it's there to protect your personal liberty? It's nowhere to be found, because it's controlled by the very same people who control the corporations that you are increasingly a slave to.
Welcome to the 21st century. Enjoy the ride to the bottom. Soon enough, you won't be allowed to enjoy anything else.
Perhaps you could grace us with an answer to the Grokster question without relying on any document except the Constitution itself?
Oh, that's easy.
Is what Grokster is doing protected by the Bill of Rights? Well, to answer that, you have to ask what Grokster is doing. They're doing two things:
Publishing a program.
Advertising the program.
Publishing is a direct exercise of speech, and is thus protected under the First Amendment. And so is advertising.
That means that any ruling against Grokster must meet very high standards. And so we move on to the copyright question.
The Constitution is very clear about copyright, patents, etc. The explicit and only reason for the existence of such protections is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". And so, the test of whether or not any act is an affront to the clause in the Constitution that grants Congress the power to make laws that have the effect of "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" is whether or not the act in question impedes such progress.
Now, because the acts themselves in this case are protected by the First Amendment, the acts must clearly impede the progress of the sciences and the useful arts for them to be forbidden by law. It's not sufficient for the acts in question to be neutral with respect to that, because the acts are an exercise of one of the (if not the) most important rights we have.
What Grokster was doing doesn't clearly hinder the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. If it did, then it would be easy to show that it did. That what Grokster was doing would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment means that the plaintiff must show that Grokster's actions clearly impede the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. The plaintiff did not do so.
Hence, the decision of the Supreme Court very clearly should have been in Grokster's favor, based on nothing other than the Constitution and the stated intentions of those who wrote it.
The Iraqi insurgents seem to have no problem giving us fits with basic assault rifles and homemade bombs. Obviously the same could work in the USA if the citizens were behind it.
There's a big difference between being a nuisance against a foreign occupying power, when the people of that occupying power would really rather not be there at all, and winning a war against your own government, when said government's very existence is at stake. And despite all their efforts, the Iraqi insurgents aren't winning, because we're still there. A couple of thousand casualties a year is nothing to the military.
If the government of the U.S. were actually in any real danger from its citizenry, I guarantee that the government would pull out all the stops. It would have no problem bombing large sections of its own population into rubble if that's what it takes to stay in power. The grandparent poster is exactly correct: the citizenry hasn't got a chance without real military support.
If you don't believe me, then ask yourself what you can do as an armed citizen to protect yourself against a squadron of A-10s dropping bombs on you and shooting at you with their gatling guns. You've got nothing that can help you against that kind of firepower.
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No shit. Read what I said. That's my point: the Supreme Court made the property rights decision despite the presence of Rhenquist and O'Connor. With them gone and two new Republican/corporate stooges in their place, decisions such as the property rights decision will receive much stronger backing from the Court.
In short, instead of such decisions being somewhat uncertain as they have in the past, they will be very clear, and strongly in favor of corporate interests and control (if only because you can bank on Bush and Congress making sure that whoever they nominate is highly vulnerable to being controlled by their corporate masters -- their corporate masters will demand nothing less).
And that is why I have little doubt that the future Supreme Court will uphold the 9th Circuit Court's decision we're discussing now.
Since Rhenquist is gone and O'Connor has retired, and the entire Congress is controlled by the Republicans, Bush will almost certainly put a couple of Republican/corporate stooges on the Supreme Court.
So I would worry about this ruling being upheld by the Supreme Court.
I mean, they did rule that local governments can sieze property on behalf of large corporate interests whenever they want, and they did (in essence) rule that an infinite number of copyright term extensions are in fact legal as long as each extension is itself finite, and those were before Rhenquist died (and perhaps even before O'Connor retired).
No, I fully expect this ruling to be upheld by the Supreme Court, because it gives greater control to the corporations.
No, they do not have the right to prohibit you from using their product in a way they didn't intend.
Copyright gives you exclusive right to distribute your work. That is all. Anything beyond that is not covered by copyright, and certainly is not covered by the clause in the Constitution which covers copyright.
Because otherwise, the same restrictions could be applied to anything that has a copyright associated with it: books, magazines, articles, and even this message.
Just think of the things copyright holders could do if the EULA were to be applied to more traditional forms of copyrighted works. They could, for instance, forbid the sale of the work (thus circumventing first-sale laws). They could stipulate that libraries are not allowed to keep a copy of the work in question, thus effectively shutting down libraries if enough publishers did that.
If EULAs cannot be applied to non-software, why should they be valid for software?
See, this is an attitude that I don't understand.
I mean, look at the characteristics of modern mainframes:
What's not cool about that?
As long as you can continue to learn new and interesting things on the job (and remember, "new" is relative to the person learning things), why wouldn't you want to work with mainframes?
At the end of the day, a mainframe is just an extremely capable computing platform. With its virtualization capabilities, you can run the latest and greatest stuff on it (Linux of various flavors) *and* the old-school stuff all at the same time, all without interrupting production.
The primary reason mainframes aren't more popular than they are is that they're expensive. You pay for the throughput and uptime capabilities of the mainframe. But in this case, you get what you pay for. That's a big reason mainframes aren't dead and buried already.
I mean, if they're not going to give you specifics of the job but demand you give them a specific dollar amount, then you should specify an amount that's enough to take care of you for the rest of your life, because you have to account for the possibility that the project will take that kind of time, right?
And hey, they have the right to refuse to take you up on it, so no harm done, right?
The look on their face is likely to be just as priceless regardless. :-)
Not strictly, no. It's marketing. Same thing, different name.
Remember: Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing firm.
You should never believe what a marketing firm says. Their purpose in life is to lie in whatever way necessary to get you to buy whatever they're trying to sell. They'll say anything and do anything, no matter how false or shallow. I need only point at the huge pile of advertisements that surround you to illustrate that. Not one of them gives you the straight scoop. Not a single one.
Just like every politician out there.
Marketing, like politics, is the antithesis of truth.
For the rest of the world to catch up, they had to either accelerate to a higher development speed than the U.S. was maintaining, or the U.S. had to slow down its development speed. I don't see much evidence of the former, and plenty of evidence of the latter.
And that is the problem. There's no good reason for the U.S. to have slowed down its pace of technological development unless it has lost some fundamental spark that it once had.
*ducks*
Governments have no respect for people's right to communicate over the internet because they have no respect for people's right to communicate at all.
The only reason the wiretap laws for more traditional forms of communication have judicial protections built-in is that they were formulated and passed during a period of time when the members of the government generally cared about people's rights, at least a little.
Today governments don't give a crap about anybody's rights, because the people who are running them today don't care about anything but power and control. And they can get away with it, too, because they control all the guns of any consequence (the pathetic peashooters the civilians are allowed to have are no match for the real guns controlled by the military).
Governments across the world are figuring out that civilians have no real power anymore. It won't be long now until the world's transition to the kind of dystopia depicted in so many science fiction books is complete.
It appears the Soviet Union died because it was a bit ahead of its time, not because governments want to avoid becoming like it.
Seriously. Can you name one place in the entire world where the freedom of the people is significantly improving? Iraq may be the only place where that's true, and I think most of us would agree that the "freedom" the people have there is more a matter of appearances than reality. I'm not here to debate about Iraq, though, so feel free to count it as an example of improving freedom in the world if you wish.
But I can name many more places where real freedom is heading into the gutter than where it's on the upswing.
Yeah, no kidding. Obviously the guys who wrote zotob don't know what they're doing, because we haven't seen a single infec@#@)!!)@$ NO CARRIER
I'm sure Microsoft will get plenty of sympathy from any Senator they want as long as the "campaign contribution" check is fat enough.
Modern governments are too interested in power and control over the population to allow people to be able to escape their grasp so easily and permanently.
Space is the last frontier. Modern governments will want to maintain tight control over who goes there and why, because space potentially goes well beyond their reach.
That's why I don't think we'll see any meaningful manned presence in space for a long, long time (much longer than a human lifetime, at least), unless it's strictly military or strictly dependent on earth for survival.
Revolution? When they (the governments) have all the guns (and really nasty ones at that)? Good luck, you're going to really, really need it.
And if you don't believe me, then name just one successful revolution in the last 50 years by the civilian population against a government with a modern military, when the civilian population didn't have a lot of external military aid.
What do you mean "just in case"? We're talking about a situation where Cisco knows their kit will be used for Evil(tm). And you're saying they should turn a blind eye to that as long as it's profitable?
So, I take it, that means that you believe that U.S. weapons manufacturers should sell weapons, including nuclear weapons, to terrorists? After all, why should the weapons manufacturers care who they're selling to as long as they can make a tidy profit off the deal, right?
And if the above bothers you, try substituting "China" for "terrorists" in the above. It's all the same, really.
If you disagree with the the scenario I described, then tell me how is it meaningfully different from the Cisco situation?
But if you're selling your shares as a result of Cisco's human rights policies, who do you think is buying them? Right: someone who doesn't care about Cisco's human rights policies.
So if all the shareholders who care about this issue sold their Cisco stock, the end result afterwards is that none of the shareholders would care about the issue anymore. And since the corporation will claim to have a responsibility to its current shareholders, it will continue violating human rights as long as it's profitable to do so.
So by selling your Cisco stock, you're likely to make the problem worse. You have far more control (even if it's still miniscule) over Cisco as someone who actually owns Cisco stock than as someone who doesn't.
Really? Says who? You?
And that includes taking steps to change what is legal and what isn't, right? So you believe that it's the job of a CEO to do whatever it takes to make slavery legal, since that would clearly make it easier for him to make money, right?
No way. The business of business is to do whatever its owners and the society it exists in want it to do. Making money at the expense of the well-being of others may be your priority (and that of those who currently run so many corporations today), but no sane society would tolerate that behavior, much less condone it.
If the shareholders aren't the ones who the corporation should answer to, then who should it answer to? You can't simultaneously claim (a) that the corporation should maximize profit at the expense of everything else because of its responsibility to its shareholders and (b) that it doesn't have any responsibility to the same shareholders when they demand ethical behavior from it.
To attempt to make those claims simultaneously is to reveal your true beliefs on the matter: that corporations should be evil (for what is evil if not intentionally harming others for your own gain?). Since corporations are treated by the legal system as individuals (something that I'm sure you agree with), it obviously follows that you believe that individuals, too, should act the same way. In short, you appear to condone evil in general.
Sorry, but I don't. And neither do most people that I know.
Now, of course, you probably don't actually condone evil. But it's what logically follows from your apparent beliefs about corporations. In short, you appear to have an internal inconsistency in your belief system that you need to resolve.
Paying for a product or service is one thing. Being artificially constrained in the choices available because of collusion within the industry (which this most surely is) is another thing entirely. We are being forced to deal with the latter, and have no power to change it. Refusing to buy isn't sufficient in the face of a tightly controlled market. The whole point of a competitive market is to provide customers with choices and to keep the price of those choices affordable. For most of the things the grandparent article talks about, choices do not exist (where, for instance, are the movie theaters that do not show commercials prior to showing the same main features that the other theaters are showing?).
George Washington and crew lived during a time when the firepower of the average soldier and the firepower of the average armed civilian were about the same.
This ain't the 1700s anymore. Today, the average soldier has, after accounting for all of the conventional support weaponry indirectly at his disposal, a many hundreds to one advantage in firepower over the average armed civilian. When you factor in weapons of mass destruction, that advantage rises to tens or even hundreds of thousands to one.
And even in George's day, they still needed military help from the French to win. No power on the planet would be stupid enough to give military aid to a popular uprising against the U.S. government, lest they find a few nukes lobbed their direction.
If the power of the U.S. government is seriously challenged, that government will do whatever it takes to remain in power, even if it has to nuke its own civilian population (which it will do only if nothing else can work, of course). Such is the nature of all power-mad governments.
Really? When?
Name one single example after 9/11 where letters such as what you describe (and not accompanied by a check for $100,000) have made a real difference in the fight against a bill whose purpose was to give the federal government more power or to satisfy the desires of large corporations (in other words, a bill that the "representatives" want to pass despite the wishes of the people).
Bet you can't.
Really?
Where in the world did you get this hopelessly naive viewpoint from?
The vast majority of governments throughout human history have been the type that restrains the people. Despotisms. Monarchies. Banana republics. It's only within the last couple of hundred years that we've seen a move towards individual empowerment. Now we're seeing a move away from it again.
And since the modern tools to subdue large populations can only be defended against by weapons that no individual can afford, the trend towards worldwide totalitarianism will inexorably accelerate, not slow down, until the entire world is a totalitarian state.
And once that happens, there will be no outside force to push it over. It'll topple on its own, eventually. Everything changes, given enough time. But it'll take thousands of years.
Has it occurred to you that if the U.S. goes down this path, it's likely that most of the rest of the Western world will go down the same path? Europe is already well on its way with the way the E.U. is organized, with the U.K. leading the charge.
If that happens, then who is going to be around to overthrow them? No police state that I've ever heard of has been overthrown from within to be replaced by some sort of democratic government without significant outside influence, if not outright military intervention (the USSR is the closest to this, but it transitioned from a police state as a result of economic competition with the West). But that's exactly what would be required if the world falls into the darkness of fascism. And fall it will, if the current trends continue.
You can get (and people have been) fired for doing things on your own time that the company doesn't like.
You can get (and people, like this guy, have been) fired for saying things on your own time that your company doesn't like.
Notice a common theme here? The common theme is that if you work for a company, that company owns you. You are their slave. In exchange for an ever decreasing amount of money for your time, you have to do everything they tell you and demonstrate that you believe everything they want you to believe.
And the government that keeps telling you that it's there to protect your personal liberty? It's nowhere to be found, because it's controlled by the very same people who control the corporations that you are increasingly a slave to.
Welcome to the 21st century. Enjoy the ride to the bottom. Soon enough, you won't be allowed to enjoy anything else.
Oh, that's easy.
Publishing is a direct exercise of speech, and is thus protected under the First Amendment. And so is advertising.
That means that any ruling against Grokster must meet very high standards. And so we move on to the copyright question.
The Constitution is very clear about copyright, patents, etc. The explicit and only reason for the existence of such protections is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". And so, the test of whether or not any act is an affront to the clause in the Constitution that grants Congress the power to make laws that have the effect of "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" is whether or not the act in question impedes such progress.
Now, because the acts themselves in this case are protected by the First Amendment, the acts must clearly impede the progress of the sciences and the useful arts for them to be forbidden by law. It's not sufficient for the acts in question to be neutral with respect to that, because the acts are an exercise of one of the (if not the) most important rights we have.
What Grokster was doing doesn't clearly hinder the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. If it did, then it would be easy to show that it did. That what Grokster was doing would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment means that the plaintiff must show that Grokster's actions clearly impede the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. The plaintiff did not do so.
Hence, the decision of the Supreme Court very clearly should have been in Grokster's favor, based on nothing other than the Constitution and the stated intentions of those who wrote it.
There's a big difference between being a nuisance against a foreign occupying power, when the people of that occupying power would really rather not be there at all, and winning a war against your own government, when said government's very existence is at stake. And despite all their efforts, the Iraqi insurgents aren't winning, because we're still there. A couple of thousand casualties a year is nothing to the military.
If the government of the U.S. were actually in any real danger from its citizenry, I guarantee that the government would pull out all the stops. It would have no problem bombing large sections of its own population into rubble if that's what it takes to stay in power. The grandparent poster is exactly correct: the citizenry hasn't got a chance without real military support.
If you don't believe me, then ask yourself what you can do as an armed citizen to protect yourself against a squadron of A-10s dropping bombs on you and shooting at you with their gatling guns. You've got nothing that can help you against that kind of firepower.