That's the short reply. Long version: the UN, as evidenced by the oil-for-food scandal and their attempts to impose a tax on the U.S., is a corrupt organization of politicos bent on controlling everything - not unlike the American government, really.
The trouble is, the UN wants to make everything a bureaucratic struggle, such as in Darfur, and that bureaucracy would strangle the organization of the Internet.
More often than not, decentralization works better than centralization -- smaller businesses tend not to abuse their customers as much as big businesses do, smaller governments tend not to abuse their people as much as bigger governments do, and so on. It's a matter of accountability - like with the problem of increasing numbers of managers over one's head back at the office, increasing the number of "official" overseers only bogs down efficiency. Let the customers of an organization or individual be the real overseers (as is the case currently w/ ICANN) - this is a decentralizing move.
Hence, in the name of decentralization, in the name of not being tied up in corruption (at least as much of it as the UN clearly is), in the name of efficiency -- I would argue that leaving ICANN in its current position is better than putting it under the wing of the UN.
(Note to knee-jerk UN defenders: the UN has its place as a means of mediating conflicts between nations and smoothing things over; as a forum for foreign relations. But we should all be worried when it starts interfering with the sovereignty of any nation, whether that nation is ours or not.)
The moment I saw Red Hat set the sun on the "little people" of the Linux community after making RH9 their last release was the moment I knew RH would cease to be (inaccurately, technically-wrongly) equated with "Linux" in peoples' minds.
Now, SuSE seems as close to being "king" of the Linux desktop as any distro (along with Gentoo), because unlike RH, they had the foresight not to abandon the very customers writing and testing the code to whom SuSE sells it back on a DVD. Nobody I know uses Fedora, and those who've tried it say it's buggy as hell; congrats Red Hat - you've lost mindshare. The question going forward is: can you earn it back? We shall see, but in time, and with money, yes, probably.
I knew it was an idiotic decision on RH's part from the get-go; good to see I'm right once in a while... If you turn your back to your customers, your customers turn their backs on you - it really is that simple.
If they did that, it would cost them business. That would cost them profit.
To what other company would they lose business? Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, along with ChoicePoint, basically constitute a personal-identity information cartel.
There is no competition, from the individual, non-business consumer's perspective, in the world of credit-reporting agencies, namely because the CRA's are selling the property *of* individuals (the copyrighted intellectual property of their name, address, phone#, credit history, etc. which each individual has themselves created and which the CRA's sell without their permission) to other businesses, not selling such property *to* individuals.
Businesses send the CRA's data on their customers, such as tenancy records, credit card usage records, and so forth; these records are kept by the CRA's as a profile from which other businesses may review individuals for jobs, mortgages, loans, and so forth. The individual has no real say in these records, beyond getting a credit report once a year and disputing inaccuracies.
Hence, there exists no competition between the CRA's, from the perspective of you and me. So, to whom do they lose business and profit, again?
In short, running programs using Wine is "native", and, programs that work at all are often actually faster with Wine than with Windows for the same reasons that anything runs faster on Linux.
Faster than on Windows? That has not been my experience at all.
Maybe 80-90% as fast (just a seat-of-the-pants guesstimate)...
I believe most people don't consider George W. Bush either a Democrat or a socialist.
Well, I would consider most of his economic policies thus-far (his tax cuts aside, but including -- perhaps *especiallly*, in fact, because it gets the government controlling peoples' ownership in businesses -- his Social Security reform proposal) to be of a socialist nature. Steel tariffs, a $1.2 trillion (claimed $400 billion, but has grown in actuality since then) Medicare expansion, no govn't spending vetos in his first term (a record last-matched about 150 years ago by President Millard Fillmore), and the largest growth in government spending since Lyndon B. Johnson (of the "Great Society" socialist programs fame) -- all of these hardly add up to a President who really, *honestly* believes in the smaller-government populist propaganda he espouses.
His social policies, OTOH, are straight-up southern conservative though, all in favor of war, limiting free-speech, outlawing gay marriage, outlawing abortions, etc..
In sum, the truth is, George W. Bush is a fascist socialist, or a "totalitarian-lite" socialist. In virtually every respect, he is the antithesis of everything I stand for, namely, individual freedoms and a wide variety of civil liberties regardless of race or sexual preference, *true* free-market capitalism (not this phony bullshit govn't-run "capitalism" he wants to institute w/ his SS personalization reforms), and anti-interventionist foreign policy. It's a value set that is in rather short demand these days...
I believe most people don't consider George W. Bush either a Democrat or a socialist./BLOCKQUOTE Well, I would consider most of his economic policies thus-far (his tax cuts aside, but including -- perhaps *especiallly*, in fact, because it gets the government controlling peoples' ownership in businesses -- his Social Security reform proposal) to be of a socialist nature. Steel tariffs, a $1.2 trillion (claimed $400 billion, but has grown in actuality since then) Medicare expansion, no govn't spending vetos in his first term (a record last-matched about 150 years ago by President Millard Fillmore), and the largest growth in government spending since Lyndon B. Johnson (of the "Great Society" socialist programs fame) -- all of these hardly add up to a President who really, *honestly* believes in the smaller-government populist propaganda he espouses.
His social policies, OTOH, are straight-up southern conservative though, all in favor of war, limiting free-speech, outlawing gay marriage, outlawing abortions, etc..
In sum, the truth is, George W. Bush is a fascist socialist, or a "totalitarian-lite" socialist. In virtually every respect, he is the antithesis of everything I stand for, namely, individual freedoms and a wide variety of civil liberties regardless of race or sexual preference, *true* free-market capitalism (not this phony bullshit govn't-run "capitalism" he wants to institute w/ his SS personalization reforms), and anti-interventionist foreign policy. It's a value set that is in rather short demand these days...
A Superintendent is accountable to te public as an elected official. If he defies the Will of the People, he will know it at election time.
Indeed. But the responsibility of such matters still trickles down; if the superintendent is held responsible, then he in turn (in theory) will hold the principal responsible. It is, after all, the principal who is instituting this RFID system, not the superintendent; hence, blame is correctly-laid at his feet, not the superintendent's (even if he is the political gateway between the public and their public school).
I assume you have no clue how this all works together? The teachers' union (the NEA) has nothing to do with the decision making process here. This is the result of a decision made by an elected official. How the hell does the NEA benefit from this? Where is the "vested interest" you claimed? I don't see it.
I'm speaking in terms of the vested interest public teacher's unions have in maintaining the status quo of public schools which employ them. The NEA does not want to see the public school system we have presently be reformed in any significant way (e.g. by voucherizing the system and thus introducing competition into the choice of schools among the public), because it damages their consitituency's ability to get hired (i.e., they realize that increased competition will drive the public school teachers who are their members out of a job once people realize how incompetent many (though certainly not all!) of them are compared to private school teachers). Like any union, they oppose competition because it destroys their monopolistic advantage on the strength of the labor force, in this case, of the teacher labor force.
Socialism has nothing to do with THIS problem.
On the contrary, socialism (the forced public funding of schools which are a failure and which have no real competition, by government fiat) is at the *heart* of the problem.
It may not an obvious link, but it is certainly there. The lack of competition (as is typified under a socialist system of any kind, be it Social Security, Medicare, public education, etc. -- although it is *possible* for a socialized system to encourage competition (e.g. via a voucher system, but then, that would require private competition, which are then funded by tax dollars via the voucher whenever the individual family chooses to spend it with the private school), this rarely occurs in practice, and when it does, it happens in the European market-socialist nations like Sweden (where, in fact, they have already voucherized their education system, to great positive effect!)), more than any other major factor, is the problem...
Sociallism works fine, properly applied. For starters, lets have Gov't mandated sterialization for the dumb and lazy. The problem with capitalists is they love to ignore the root problems and treat the symptoms instead, mostly 'cause it's more profitable that way.
Well, I would argue that the great thing about capitalism is that it lets people be stupid without it affecting *me* -- therein lies the extra individual freedom of a market-based sytem as a not-insignificant benefit...:)
But yeah, there are plenty of morons who don't pay a lick of attention to their children or their child's education, and such people do drive me nuts...
Well, I was thinking w.r.t. copy/pasting between, say, aterm and Firefox specifically. Show me a terminal as lightweight as aterm, yet which supports transparency and sane copy/paste, and I will be a happy user.:)
Konsole works as far as copy/paste goes, but is bloated; last I checked, it took about 3.5MB per instance, versus aterm's 800KB or so. That was admittedly a couple years ago though.
If the parents don't like what the principal did they can elect a new school board.
Yeah - next year. And that assumes enough parents care enough to oust the existing school board, which, considering the apathy of voters and of parents' involvement in education, is probably not the case at all -- hence, the existing school board's ousting is unlikely, at best.
But assuming they *are* ousted, what do the concerned parents do until then?
And besides who's to say the new principal will be any different w.r.t. RFID or any other privacy-invading system the same parents may not like?
What's wrong with competition between schools -- i.e., if you don't like the education system of one school, take your child out and send him/her to a different school? Fundamentally, that's all I'd like to see. Yet, in public education, there is no real competition -- the money you pay for K-12 education, by default, goes to whatever educational system has been assigned to you by the state. Don't like it? Tough.
And that's the problem -- no competition. If there were a competing school in the area which was not going to track children via RFID, the concerned parents could send their kids there intead. But that choice, if it exists at all, exists in private schools only -- private schools for which the parents would have to pay extra for (i.e., $public_school_funds + $private_school_funds).
What's the matter - does a little competition interfere with your preference for socialism?
Public schools should be abolished! All kids should go to private schools!
Oh wait, except the people who can't pay for it.
Prior to the early 1850s, when publicly-funded K-12 schools were instituted in America, about 95% of Americans still attended school and received some education. And this was when America was still a largely-agrarian nation, when a K-12 education was not the fundamental requirement it is today.
I don't argue for everybody going to private schools though; I argue for voucherizing education funding. People still pay their taxes to fund education, but the funding is performed via a voucher given to parents which may be used at any school -- public or private. This encourages competition between schools, rather than the stagnation seen in public schools today. Crappy schools die, and good schools rise from the sea of shit.
BTW, if you want to argue against my ideas and call them stupid, go ahead -- I went to public school from preschool through college, and look how I turned out! (if my arguments are poor, then just remember, I'm a product of the education system you promote...)
Yes, because the other 99% don't care enough either way to get involved and make their opinions known.
If those 99% are indifferent, then their vote can be cast either way with no marginal effect. So long as the vocal minority influences the sum total "will of the public" towards their direction, so too follows the 99% of the public's will which is apathetic, because the less-than-1% minority favoring the RFID system spoke with less of a voice than the less-than-1% minority opposing it.
The company providing RFID recognized this -- they recognized the market they were dealing with, and acted accordingly -- and they pulled out. What then, does that suggest about the public's opinion of RFID in schools being used to track their children? Businesses act in their self-interest (as so many/.'ers here are aware and critical of business for doing), and in this case, it was in their self-interest as a corporation to end their support...
That you would call RFID tracking of children a "promising idea", however, suggests your own personal bias -- nevermind the ironic, arguably hypocritical fact that you're posting as an AC.
So here we have a case in which 2 opposing sides -- the public, and the publicly-funded government school -- are fighting over a technology that a private company has been selling and promoting.
The people paying for the system get pissed off about it. Company responds by having nothing more to do with the situation -- in other words, the company, recognizing the threat to their own future profits, is catering to the demands of the public.
Meanwhile, the government, represented by the school principal, still wants to act against the will of the public which is funding it.
Please, somebody promote socialism to me, and tell me that the government responds better to public demands than businesses do, or heck, even that the govn't has the public's best interests in mind. LOL!
The sad thing is, that because of vested interests (read: public school teacher unions), the parents are going to continue paying for this system they oppose. Welcome to the wonders of socialism and government, generally.
Rather than worrying about "button smoke" and "lavish workspace switching", why don't the X people worry about the absolute dirt-basic foundational things, like, oh, cut/copy/paste -- which STILL does not work correctly across all windows in X?
Even fucking Windows 3.1 got this right. And where is X? Stuck in an era prior to 3.1, apparently, or, about 15 years behind the times.
I frankly do not give a flying fuck about whether my buttons are lickable or come in the color "Cornflower Blue." I care about *practical* things, like cutting/pasting...
After years of inaction on my part, earlier this year I finally decided to make a donation to the EFF, because I agree with their position in virtually every case they take up.
Hence, we have things called "class action lawsuits", in which many individuals team up to hire a good lawyer or two to take on these corporations who also have a good lawyer or two...
(President Bush wants to limit class-action suits, however. I don't like it either.)
Chances are good that President Bush will sign this into law, claiming that it will help fight terrorism and other boogeymen, nevermind the fact that the 9/11 hijackers used IDs as legit as anybody else's.
Most Republicans in government are fuckwads. If they want my vote, or the vote of anybody who is even *remotely* interested in protecting the civil liberties and Constitutional protections for which the U.S. has been so famous and well-regarded, then they'd do well to listen to one of their own.
Until then, fuck that coke-snorting, basement-level-IQ RINO running the country, fuck those groupthink RINOs in Congress. Real Republicans vote against totalitarianism and in favor of federalism -- precisely the opposite traits of any national ID program we could ever institute.
Fucking commie pinko red-staters, every one of them.
I am sure there are many "conservatives" who want less government that would jump all over this.
Not since the neocons took over. The only small-government promoters left in the world are apparently libertarians and the old-school "Reagan Republicans" who still favor a bigger military, but at least tend to prefer less govn't elsewhere.
Unfortunately, both are a dying breed, and Bush is doing his best to soil the principles and positions of both.
Hopefully Libertarians will take power before all is lost.
Sounds great! I'd cream myself if that happened.
But for a variety of reasons, it will never happen, so no change of underwear required...
Unfortunately, having a J.D. doesn't give you a sudden rush of magical insight into Supreme Court decisions.
Certainly not!
Judging truth of argumentation by credentials is, well, pretty bloody stupid (doubly so in an adversarial system)
Indeed; it's the logical fallacy of appeal-to-authority.
And yet, who are we to trust more on knowledge of the facts of the case: you, who has yet to provide any evidence of education or practice in the field of law, or Mr. Rasch, who has both?
Wisdom suggests that those with experience and education are usually -- though not always -- better able to understand their own profession than onlookers. Hence, while it may be *logically* baseless to listen to authority, there exists a well-established base of *reasonableness* to do so.
Ultimately, I still don't see what your beef with TFA is. You never specified where Mr. Rasch diverged from the facts of the case, though you've implicated the significance of it (making money in a network-security firm by scaring people about privacy concerns)... Rasch's goal was not to discuss the strengths/weaknesses of the case; his audience has little interest in such analysis, and that's been done elsewhere anyway, as you pointed out.
No, Rasch's goal was to present the potential effect on Internet privacy the ruling could have; *that* is something his audience is interested in. And Rasch did that reasonably-well.
As I have pointed out in other comments on this story, you can tell he's a wannabe because he's writing articles like this without even mentioning the actual name of the case, much less carefully citing authority for what he is trying to say, as he'd be required to if he were a good enough writer to have an article published in a scholarly law review journal.
Perhaps. Except you're forgetting one fundamental rule of writing:
Consider your audience.
Who is Rasch's audience? Computer security geeks specifically, but computer geeks in general. Probably managers of technical departments as well. But not other lawyers.
When you talk to end-users and tell them you're writing an app, do you tell them you're using, say, C# and the.NET libs? Or Perl + [insert list of modules]? Or do you tell them simply the main idea behind the app?
Unless the person I'm talking to is also technically-minded, I ignore such details and describe only the main concept and possibly its major-level functionality, because the listener doesn't give a damn about technical details, nor do they understand them.
Likewise, the audience to which Mr. Rasch is writing largely doesn't give a damn about the specific case. It's not their job to know or care -- that's the job of attorneys whom they hire, of which, Mr. Rasch is one.
SecurityFocus is by no means a scholarly law review journal -- hence, Mr. Rasch is not going to write like it is one, if he has any competence with the basics of reading and writing (a 1L course) at all.
Not all lawyers understand Constitutional Law. Don't assume otherwise.
That's true (and sometimes I wonder if our USSC justices would fit this description). But Con. Law is, from my understanding, a requirement in law school -- at least, the ones I'm aware of.
Whether the students come out of Con. Law with a solid foundation in it is the fundamental question, and one which we cannot over-generalize in saying that lawyers do/do not understand it.
But the question is partially-answered by the fact that they took a course in it, and therefore, had at least enough experience with Con. Law to pass the class (a significant event, as a law degree is considerably harder than an undergraduate degree, from my discussions with a few law-school friends of mine).
Slashdot Mirror
No.
That's the short reply. Long version: the UN, as evidenced by the oil-for-food scandal and their attempts to impose a tax on the U.S., is a corrupt organization of politicos bent on controlling everything - not unlike the American government, really.
The trouble is, the UN wants to make everything a bureaucratic struggle, such as in Darfur, and that bureaucracy would strangle the organization of the Internet.
More often than not, decentralization works better than centralization -- smaller businesses tend not to abuse their customers as much as big businesses do, smaller governments tend not to abuse their people as much as bigger governments do, and so on. It's a matter of accountability - like with the problem of increasing numbers of managers over one's head back at the office, increasing the number of "official" overseers only bogs down efficiency. Let the customers of an organization or individual be the real overseers (as is the case currently w/ ICANN) - this is a decentralizing move.
Hence, in the name of decentralization, in the name of not being tied up in corruption (at least as much of it as the UN clearly is), in the name of efficiency -- I would argue that leaving ICANN in its current position is better than putting it under the wing of the UN.
(Note to knee-jerk UN defenders: the UN has its place as a means of mediating conflicts between nations and smoothing things over; as a forum for foreign relations. But we should all be worried when it starts interfering with the sovereignty of any nation, whether that nation is ours or not.)
So how long until I can purchase a Human Area Networking Device?
Bring on the sex jokes now...
You are illiterate. I specifically said "nobody I know uses Fedora".
The moment I saw Red Hat set the sun on the "little people" of the Linux community after making RH9 their last release was the moment I knew RH would cease to be (inaccurately, technically-wrongly) equated with "Linux" in peoples' minds.
Now, SuSE seems as close to being "king" of the Linux desktop as any distro (along with Gentoo), because unlike RH, they had the foresight not to abandon the very customers writing and testing the code to whom SuSE sells it back on a DVD. Nobody I know uses Fedora, and those who've tried it say it's buggy as hell; congrats Red Hat - you've lost mindshare. The question going forward is: can you earn it back? We shall see, but in time, and with money, yes, probably.
I knew it was an idiotic decision on RH's part from the get-go; good to see I'm right once in a while... If you turn your back to your customers, your customers turn their backs on you - it really is that simple.
What?! Blasphemer!!
Please leave the site now. This is Slashdot - nobody who RTFA's is allowed here...
To what other company would they lose business? Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, along with ChoicePoint, basically constitute a personal-identity information cartel.
There is no competition, from the individual, non-business consumer's perspective, in the world of credit-reporting agencies, namely because the CRA's are selling the property *of* individuals (the copyrighted intellectual property of their name, address, phone#, credit history, etc. which each individual has themselves created and which the CRA's sell without their permission) to other businesses, not selling such property *to* individuals.
Businesses send the CRA's data on their customers, such as tenancy records, credit card usage records, and so forth; these records are kept by the CRA's as a profile from which other businesses may review individuals for jobs, mortgages, loans, and so forth. The individual has no real say in these records, beyond getting a credit report once a year and disputing inaccuracies.
Hence, there exists no competition between the CRA's, from the perspective of you and me. So, to whom do they lose business and profit, again?
Faster than on Windows? That has not been my experience at all.
Maybe 80-90% as fast (just a seat-of-the-pants guesstimate)...
Well, I would consider most of his economic policies thus-far (his tax cuts aside, but including -- perhaps *especiallly*, in fact, because it gets the government controlling peoples' ownership in businesses -- his Social Security reform proposal) to be of a socialist nature. Steel tariffs, a $1.2 trillion (claimed $400 billion, but has grown in actuality since then) Medicare expansion, no govn't spending vetos in his first term (a record last-matched about 150 years ago by President Millard Fillmore), and the largest growth in government spending since Lyndon B. Johnson (of the "Great Society" socialist programs fame) -- all of these hardly add up to a President who really, *honestly* believes in the smaller-government populist propaganda he espouses.
His social policies, OTOH, are straight-up southern conservative though, all in favor of war, limiting free-speech, outlawing gay marriage, outlawing abortions, etc..
In sum, the truth is, George W. Bush is a fascist socialist, or a "totalitarian-lite" socialist. In virtually every respect, he is the antithesis of everything I stand for, namely, individual freedoms and a wide variety of civil liberties regardless of race or sexual preference, *true* free-market capitalism (not this phony bullshit govn't-run "capitalism" he wants to institute w/ his SS personalization reforms), and anti-interventionist foreign policy. It's a value set that is in rather short demand these days...
Indeed. But the responsibility of such matters still trickles down; if the superintendent is held responsible, then he in turn (in theory) will hold the principal responsible. It is, after all, the principal who is instituting this RFID system, not the superintendent; hence, blame is correctly-laid at his feet, not the superintendent's (even if he is the political gateway between the public and their public school).
I'm speaking in terms of the vested interest public teacher's unions have in maintaining the status quo of public schools which employ them. The NEA does not want to see the public school system we have presently be reformed in any significant way (e.g. by voucherizing the system and thus introducing competition into the choice of schools among the public), because it damages their consitituency's ability to get hired (i.e., they realize that increased competition will drive the public school teachers who are their members out of a job once people realize how incompetent many (though certainly not all!) of them are compared to private school teachers). Like any union, they oppose competition because it destroys their monopolistic advantage on the strength of the labor force, in this case, of the teacher labor force.
On the contrary, socialism (the forced public funding of schools which are a failure and which have no real competition, by government fiat) is at the *heart* of the problem.
It may not an obvious link, but it is certainly there. The lack of competition (as is typified under a socialist system of any kind, be it Social Security, Medicare, public education, etc. -- although it is *possible* for a socialized system to encourage competition (e.g. via a voucher system, but then, that would require private competition, which are then funded by tax dollars via the voucher whenever the individual family chooses to spend it with the private school), this rarely occurs in practice, and when it does, it happens in the European market-socialist nations like Sweden (where, in fact, they have already voucherized their education system, to great positive effect!)), more than any other major factor, is the problem...
Well, I would argue that the great thing about capitalism is that it lets people be stupid without it affecting *me* -- therein lies the extra individual freedom of a market-based sytem as a not-insignificant benefit...
But yeah, there are plenty of morons who don't pay a lick of attention to their children or their child's education, and such people do drive me nuts...
Well, I was thinking w.r.t. copy/pasting between, say, aterm and Firefox specifically. Show me a terminal as lightweight as aterm, yet which supports transparency and sane copy/paste, and I will be a happy user. :)
Konsole works as far as copy/paste goes, but is bloated; last I checked, it took about 3.5MB per instance, versus aterm's 800KB or so. That was admittedly a couple years ago though.
Yeah - next year. And that assumes enough parents care enough to oust the existing school board, which, considering the apathy of voters and of parents' involvement in education, is probably not the case at all -- hence, the existing school board's ousting is unlikely, at best.
But assuming they *are* ousted, what do the concerned parents do until then?
And besides who's to say the new principal will be any different w.r.t. RFID or any other privacy-invading system the same parents may not like?
What's wrong with competition between schools -- i.e., if you don't like the education system of one school, take your child out and send him/her to a different school? Fundamentally, that's all I'd like to see. Yet, in public education, there is no real competition -- the money you pay for K-12 education, by default, goes to whatever educational system has been assigned to you by the state. Don't like it? Tough.
And that's the problem -- no competition. If there were a competing school in the area which was not going to track children via RFID, the concerned parents could send their kids there intead. But that choice, if it exists at all, exists in private schools only -- private schools for which the parents would have to pay extra for (i.e., $public_school_funds + $private_school_funds).
What's the matter - does a little competition interfere with your preference for socialism?
Prior to the early 1850s, when publicly-funded K-12 schools were instituted in America, about 95% of Americans still attended school and received some education. And this was when America was still a largely-agrarian nation, when a K-12 education was not the fundamental requirement it is today.
I don't argue for everybody going to private schools though; I argue for voucherizing education funding. People still pay their taxes to fund education, but the funding is performed via a voucher given to parents which may be used at any school -- public or private. This encourages competition between schools, rather than the stagnation seen in public schools today. Crappy schools die, and good schools rise from the sea of shit.
BTW, if you want to argue against my ideas and call them stupid, go ahead -- I went to public school from preschool through college, and look how I turned out! (if my arguments are poor, then just remember, I'm a product of the education system you promote...)
Yes, because the other 99% don't care enough either way to get involved and make their opinions known.
/.'ers here are aware and critical of business for doing), and in this case, it was in their self-interest as a corporation to end their support...
If those 99% are indifferent, then their vote can be cast either way with no marginal effect. So long as the vocal minority influences the sum total "will of the public" towards their direction, so too follows the 99% of the public's will which is apathetic, because the less-than-1% minority favoring the RFID system spoke with less of a voice than the less-than-1% minority opposing it.
The company providing RFID recognized this -- they recognized the market they were dealing with, and acted accordingly -- and they pulled out. What then, does that suggest about the public's opinion of RFID in schools being used to track their children? Businesses act in their self-interest (as so many
That you would call RFID tracking of children a "promising idea", however, suggests your own personal bias -- nevermind the ironic, arguably hypocritical fact that you're posting as an AC.
So here we have a case in which 2 opposing sides -- the public, and the publicly-funded government school -- are fighting over a technology that a private company has been selling and promoting.
The people paying for the system get pissed off about it. Company responds by having nothing more to do with the situation -- in other words, the company, recognizing the threat to their own future profits, is catering to the demands of the public.
Meanwhile, the government, represented by the school principal, still wants to act against the will of the public which is funding it.
Please, somebody promote socialism to me, and tell me that the government responds better to public demands than businesses do, or heck, even that the govn't has the public's best interests in mind. LOL!
The sad thing is, that because of vested interests (read: public school teacher unions), the parents are going to continue paying for this system they oppose. Welcome to the wonders of socialism and government, generally.
Rather than worrying about "button smoke" and "lavish workspace switching", why don't the X people worry about the absolute dirt-basic foundational things, like, oh, cut/copy/paste -- which STILL does not work correctly across all windows in X?
Even fucking Windows 3.1 got this right. And where is X? Stuck in an era prior to 3.1, apparently, or, about 15 years behind the times.
I frankly do not give a flying fuck about whether my buttons are lickable or come in the color "Cornflower Blue." I care about *practical* things, like cutting/pasting...
After years of inaction on my part, earlier this year I finally decided to make a donation to the EFF, because I agree with their position in virtually every case they take up.
:-)
This is another such case.
If you like what you see, whether in this case or in other cases, then throw some money at them to keep up the good work! Besides, you can even take the donation as a tax deduction...
Hence, we have things called "class action lawsuits", in which many individuals team up to hire a good lawyer or two to take on these corporations who also have a good lawyer or two...
(President Bush wants to limit class-action suits, however. I don't like it either.)
Yes, and yes.
Fact 1: National ID cards were used in Saddam Hussein's Iraq to track, then torture and kill people who said "bad things" about Hussein.
Fact 2: National ID cards were used to oppress citizens of the Soviet Union (do a find on "7. INTERNAL PASSPORTS").
Fact 3: Eastern Europeans experienced oppression and idiocy via national ID cards too.
Rumor 1 ("rumor", because it comes from prisonplanet.com rather than a more-reliable source): The Dept. of Homeland Security has hired the former head of socialist East Germany's infamous "Stasi" domestic spy agency - the same man who architected their national ID program.
Fact 4: Today, the U.S. House has approved by a 261-161 vote to institute an electronic national ID card system for all Americans.
Chances are good that President Bush will sign this into law, claiming that it will help fight terrorism and other boogeymen, nevermind the fact that the 9/11 hijackers used IDs as legit as anybody else's.
Question: From whom are you "free" of observation and interference when you are required to possess means of constant monitoring? Where is your right to be left alone, as suggested by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis in his famous dissent in 1928?
Even former President Ronald Reagan recognized the danger of national ID cards, albeit, from the perspective of Biblical prophecy. What about today's Republicans? Oh, that's right, Reagan Republicanism is dead, except in convenient revivals of peoples' dreams of a (relatively) freer, happier, more-hopeful America for which Reagan is so well remembered. No, the new cheer among Republicans is "long live big government totalitarian bureaucracy!" as imposed by President Bush.
Most Republicans in government are fuckwads. If they want my vote, or the vote of anybody who is even *remotely* interested in protecting the civil liberties and Constitutional protections for which the U.S. has been so famous and well-regarded, then they'd do well to listen to one of their own.
Until then, fuck that coke-snorting, basement-level-IQ RINO running the country, fuck those groupthink RINOs in Congress. Real Republicans vote against totalitarianism and in favor of federalism -- precisely the opposite traits of any national ID program we could ever institute.
Fucking commie pinko red-staters, every one of them.
Not since the neocons took over. The only small-government promoters left in the world are apparently libertarians and the old-school "Reagan Republicans" who still favor a bigger military, but at least tend to prefer less govn't elsewhere.
Unfortunately, both are a dying breed, and Bush is doing his best to soil the principles and positions of both.
Sounds great! I'd cream myself if that happened.
But for a variety of reasons, it will never happen, so no change of underwear required...
"Cold wars are heating up again!"
(not that this much is news to anybody...)
Certainly not!
Indeed; it's the logical fallacy of appeal-to-authority.
And yet, who are we to trust more on knowledge of the facts of the case: you, who has yet to provide any evidence of education or practice in the field of law, or Mr. Rasch, who has both?
Wisdom suggests that those with experience and education are usually -- though not always -- better able to understand their own profession than onlookers. Hence, while it may be *logically* baseless to listen to authority, there exists a well-established base of *reasonableness* to do so.
Ultimately, I still don't see what your beef with TFA is. You never specified where Mr. Rasch diverged from the facts of the case, though you've implicated the significance of it (making money in a network-security firm by scaring people about privacy concerns)... Rasch's goal was not to discuss the strengths/weaknesses of the case; his audience has little interest in such analysis, and that's been done elsewhere anyway, as you pointed out.
No, Rasch's goal was to present the potential effect on Internet privacy the ruling could have; *that* is something his audience is interested in. And Rasch did that reasonably-well.
Don't attack random lawyers whom you don't know.
Perhaps. Except you're forgetting one fundamental rule of writing:
Consider your audience.
Who is Rasch's audience? Computer security geeks specifically, but computer geeks in general. Probably managers of technical departments as well. But not other lawyers.
When you talk to end-users and tell them you're writing an app, do you tell them you're using, say, C# and the
Unless the person I'm talking to is also technically-minded, I ignore such details and describe only the main concept and possibly its major-level functionality, because the listener doesn't give a damn about technical details, nor do they understand them.
Likewise, the audience to which Mr. Rasch is writing largely doesn't give a damn about the specific case. It's not their job to know or care -- that's the job of attorneys whom they hire, of which, Mr. Rasch is one.
SecurityFocus is by no means a scholarly law review journal -- hence, Mr. Rasch is not going to write like it is one, if he has any competence with the basics of reading and writing (a 1L course) at all.
That's true (and sometimes I wonder if our USSC justices would fit this description). But Con. Law is, from my understanding, a requirement in law school -- at least, the ones I'm aware of.
Whether the students come out of Con. Law with a solid foundation in it is the fundamental question, and one which we cannot over-generalize in saying that lawyers do/do not understand it.
But the question is partially-answered by the fact that they took a course in it, and therefore, had at least enough experience with Con. Law to pass the class (a significant event, as a law degree is considerably harder than an undergraduate degree, from my discussions with a few law-school friends of mine).