Those aren't the only bad parts of ACTA. Here are some more odious provisions, in my opinion:
* ACTA would impose the DMCA's "no circumventing DRM" clause everywhere
* ACTA imposes 3rd party liability for infringement everywhere (it already exists in the US & much of Europe)
* ACTA creates ISP safe harbors (plus notice & takedown), but raises the bar for qualification, e.g. ISPs must have some plan to curtail repeat infringement by subscribers
* ACTA offers statutory damages to copyright holder, as well as actual damages, and as Jammie Thomas can tell you, that wipes out any relevance to damage
* ACTA targets transferring pharmaceuticals across the border, which is mostly designed to get those going from Canada to the US
* ACTA requires criminal penalties for "willful" infringers, and their aiders/abettors, which is looser than the current US standard
* The forfeiture provision for large scale infringers is vague enough to possibly be a problem
* ACTA has broad
China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, New Zealand, & Japan really don't like it for a lot of reasons. To a some extent, the developing world doesn't like it because it would cost policing resources enforcing copyright/trademark when the resources are needed for more important activities, like stopping crimes. The US & Western Europe are the largest proponents.
Angle won't win because they won't have a suit. Righthaven, once recognizing their mark isn't an easy one, will drop Angle from the suit, and nothing will change.
This is true, but higher speeds may wear roads faster. As such, a surtax on fast driving may be appropriate - not from a safety perspective, but from a fairness in cost perspective.
My biggest problem is that support seems to wax and wane with actually moving songs/videos on and off an iPod with open source alternatives... so that leaves me tied to the beast that is iTunes.
I had the same problem & concerns. I put rockbox on my iPod, and I haven't looked back. You literally just drag and drop music/videos/pictures on & off your ipod. No itunes, no random 4-string names, and far more features than the stock ipod firmware. When I put rockbox on my iPod photo/color, my iPod could now play videos!
There are downsides. You'll have to transcode ipod videos to mpeg. The menus are slower loading, it takes some twiddling to make the interface really look good, and I'm not enamored with the sleep behavior. But for me, it is well worth it to avoid iTunes and flaky 3rd party iPod loaders, not counting the new features.
As others have mentioned, you don't want to go down the rabbit hole of virtualization just to manage 20 computers in an office.
Altiris products are worth considering. The Client Management Suite is pretty terrific for managing lots of dissimilar clients. The rebranded "Backup Exec System Recovery Solution," doesn't do as much, but also works fine with different hardware clients. I haven't bought anything from them since Symantec bought them, but we loved Aliris before that.
If that's too rich for your blood, a SOHO WHS box may be enough to cover your windows machines. Ubuntu machines are easy, you could go as barebones as something like crontab, dd, gzip & rsync on an NFS share. Or you could do something fancier.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
AMA licensing forces doctors to meet some minimal standard. It raises prices because we have fewer doctors, but I think most of us would gladly pay a little more for a doctor that is a little more competent. Tort reform is attractive, but the savings aren't as big as you'd think - $54B over 10 years. That isn't nothing, but these changes would make it harder to sue incompetent doctors who cause legitimate harm to others. So if we're going to break up the AMA licensing cartel, and rely on the free market to sift through good & bad doctors, then we'd want tort enhancement rather than limits.
The public option was a bad idea. This option would've been incredibly expensive for adverse selection, equity, and expertise reasons. It wouldn't drive down prices because cost problems aren't due to insurers choosing not to compete, they're in part due to divorcing real cost from consumers, and in part due to the cost of competing in more than one region. Medicaid & medicare already cover the most unfortunate (crappy systems though they are). Plus, the public option would give private insurers all the profitable customers, and make the feds pick up the tab for those who can't afford insurance or are high need. I do think everyone needs health insurance, but I don't like guaranteeing the health insurance industry's profitability.
I can't say whether rates will actually fall with this new bill, but here are the ideas.
* 1st - mandating insurance forces low risk people into the insurance pool. Young healthy individuals often skip expensive insurance because they're low risk. Forcing them to get coverage will lower overall premiums. * 2nd - provisions in the bill to permit insurers to follow only one state's requirements - wherever the insurer is headquartered - will reduce administrative costs and encourage greater competition. Complying with 51 state laws is expensive. This change will also diffuse the ability of private interest groups to get state legislatures to mandate certain treatments to be covered. * 3rd - prohibiting screening based on pre-existing conditions will reduce information gathering costs.
What I'd like to have seen would have included * Require health care providers to charge the same price to everyone to reduce transaction/bargaining costs. Right now if I go to the hospital, and my insurer pays the bill, uninsured & underinsured individuals would pay much more for the same service because they don't have the bargaining power Blue Cross does. * Stop giving employers deductions for offering health insurance. Employer-offered-insurance reduces consumer ability to investigate & pick a policy they want, and it divorces consumers from the true costs. Instead offer deductions for individual spending on health insurance. * Permit insurers to offer catastrophic-only insurance. Because of state requirements of what an insurer must cover - which is a honeypot to treatment provider lobbyists - catastrophic only isn't an option. Even better if everyone was covered by the feds for catastrophic only, but that would be a political and logistic nightmare.
This patent BS is a joke. Did HTC hack, steal or corrupt Apple's trade secrets? Not at all and nobody believes that. It is one thing if a company steals your stuff, it is completely different if they come up with a similar idea/process independent of you.
I agree that these patent suits are a waste of everyone's time and money, and we need a serious tightening of our novelty & nonobviousness standards. But I think you're mistaken as to how patent law works.
In copyright law, if you independently come up with something similar to another's copyrighted work, you're not infringing. Not so in patent law. If you independently create a patentable invention, that is substantially similar to an existing patent, practicing your invention would violate the existing patent. Even if you alter your invention so as to fall outside the scope of the existing patent, you may still be violating the patent under the doctrine of equivalents.
Does this make sense? I don't know. It avoids the nasty question of whether an invention was done independently - and copyright law hasn't been very favorable to those claiming independent creation. But it creates the nasty problem that it is hard to know if your invention's patent is valid and it is hard to know if you're infringing a prior patent.
The bigger question is why not sue MSFT & as well - they're doing everything Yahoo & Google does. Perhaps Microsoft has many other patents they could use to retaliate against Xerox, something Google & Yahoo are a bit lighter on. Given these patents are more than a decade old, could Google & Yahoo make some sort of laches defense?
In the U.S. I would have had to have taken her to an emergency room. That would have taken 4 to 12 hours of my day and cost her about $500 copayment. Then the drugs would have cost another $65 copayment.
I'm not suggesting the US system doesn't need serious reform (it does), but comparing your good experience in the UK to what you think "would have" happened in the US is disingenuous. I've been to the hospital several times in the last two years, twice to the emergency room, and I've never waited more than 45 minutes. The emergency room copays were $20 and $50 (different insurance policies) and we've never paid more than $20 for drugs.
. I just find it interesting that the U.K. spends significantly less in terms of GDP and they don't have reduced life expectancy than the U.S.
I recently read that controlling for the increased violence rate, higher obesity rate, and higher premature birth rate wipes out the difference, and puts the US square in the middle of European countries. I can dig up the journal article for you if you'd like to read it.
If I create a work and hold the copyright on that work, google has no right to provide copies of that work without my permission, and they cannot say, "you can opt out!". That's backwards according to long established law.
Google isn't just copying books and distributing them wholesale. Without publisher consent, they'll only show very brief snippets, well within fair use. Publishers can, and have, authorized google to show a few pages or show the entire book, but default is just a few lines. You, holding a copyright, can't veto a particular fair use just because it is on the internet. Whether the initial copy google makes to generate the snippets is fair use or not, that's a different and much closer question. That's also what google's settlement addresses in part.
Either way, opt out makes google books - and any large scanning project - dead in the water. You won't ever be able to include the massive number of orphaned works, you'll have huge publisher holdout problems, and only permitting google to scan a book once permission is received would destroy scale benefits and drive the costs so high we'd never see an online library.
It isn't like XP hasn't been updated since 2001, sometimes significantly so. The jump from XP to SP1 and SP2 to SP3 - seems more akin to a jump from woody to sarge or etch to lenny. SP3 was 2008, so I wouldn't say XP is really a 9-year-old OS.
I had a discussion about the G20 summit the other day with a rabid anti-globalist. This person was vehemently opposed to any international organizations as affronts to US sovereignty. The fear is that some US diplomat (maybe the president) can use international treaties to get results they couldn't get through the political process. In this discussion, it was suggested that Obama could ban guns and curb free speech in the US through an international treaty, although congress would never pass such a law. I have a similar discussion with another individual about this when a non-binding UN resolution came up which this person didn't like (strangely, it was about child trafficking).
I think this feeling is exists among nut jobs on both sides of the traditional political divide. Unfortunately, it is based on a gross misunderstanding of the American legal system. The G20, and globalization generally, provides lots of good reasons for concern, but generic fear of international agreements overriding US sovereignty is not one of them.
For America, there is no such thing as international law
International treaties and laws don't become binding on US citizens automatically, or just because the president signed them. All international agreements must be approved by congress and signed by the president before the agreement becomes binding on Americans.
Congress cannot give up law making power to any other body. For example, Congress couldn't pass a law that says "from now on, the UN can make laws for the US." It would be unconstitutional. Laws cannot be constructed so as to bypass either/both houses because of the bicameralism principle. For example, congress passed a bill which gave power over deportation to the inspector general, but retained a veto over his actions for one house of congress. The issue came up to the Supreme Court, and a one house veto was considered unconstitutional because of bicameralism. Laws cannot be constructed to pass the president either, because of the presentment principle. US diplomats and negotiators have agreed to countless international laws, only to have the proposed laws killed or modified beyond recognition in congress.
All "international laws" must become national law before they are enforceable. I don't know about other countries, but this is how the governmental system in the US works.
Unconstitutional agreements, even if they became law, would not pass SCOTUS
The Supreme Court had the power to review any law or action binding on a US citizen. They've already held the principles of bicameralism, presentment, and non-delegation of lawmaking powers are unconstitutional. A law in violation of one of these principles wouldn't even get to SCOTUS, it would be killed by a district court.
For the specific fears of the person I was talking with, SCOTUS has already held handgun bans unconstitutional. Even if somehow a gun ban got past congress & the president, the Supreme Court would strike it down immediately. Ditto for free speech, the Supreme Court has long pushed free speech jurisprudence beyond what was popular at the time. It was the Supreme Court striking down libel suits, media shutdowns, and restrictive speech laws. The Supreme Court has demonstrated ability and willingness to strike down unconstitutional laws & actions
In sum, the president can't act unilaterally, the Supreme Court can strike down any law or government action abridging constitutional rights, and this broad fear of international agreement or cooperation is irrational and unfounded.
As a side note, the response to my argument was, "well I guess we have nothing to fear, like when the IMF sacked Argentina." I don't know enough to evaluate the truth of that statement, but it doesn't matter. My statement was about US citizens fearing a loss of US sovereignty to international cooperation, not about Argentina being rescued by the IMF.
Again, there are lots of good reasons to worry about the
My wife called it "dances with wolves" meets "fern gully" in 200 years. I thought some of the plant & animal life was really clever. I was also really glad they didn't try to make all the novel things logical - they never attempted an explanation of the flying rocks, which I think is good. The planetary neural network idea has been done an awful lot, but I think it worked just fine. The word unobtainium is still utterly ridiculous (seriously guys?), but it wasn't featured too prominently.
The aliens are still too stiff, their faces are too uniform, their movements are too smooth - they need pores, facial hair, creases, loose skin, etc - but it is still the best I've seen. Some of the new humaniod features were imaginative, like the neural connection in the pony tail, but overall the alients were pretty standard - "good" aliens must look human for us to identify with them, they must have the same mannerisms (e.g. identical emotions), and other real differences must be superficial. For example, the aliens were more like humans than the Indians in "Dances with Wolves" were like Costner, a movie which shares a number of connections with Avatar. I suppose if I want imaginative, I should just go watch La planète sauvage.
Overall though, I think this movie marks the latest in the "spectacle over plot" shift in filmmaking. Cameron has always been at the forefront of this change, right there with Michael Bay, so I should've expected it, but so it goes. Avatar did have a lot more plot than Transformers, GI Joe, and some other recently popular films, but it was still simpler than the Cat in the Hat - subtle & not-so-subtle political statements notwithstanding. Between visual effect and good writing, I'll take the latter, but why can't we have both?
You're right, there is no binding precedent or permanent injunction, but a ruling can go either way - comcast could have gotten permission to screw with their network in the future. Of course a settlement isn't as good as a favorable ruling, but it does signal to others that they can expect meddling to cost $16M and a lot of bad publicity. Plus, the incident brought the FCC down on this kind of behavior, so ISPs have that to worry about too.
Comcast is not immunized from further suits. As long as you don't take part in the settlement, you can still sue them individually. Alternately, although it is unlikely a judge will certify another class over the same issue, it has happened before (see asbestos lawsuits).
Class actions let you bring suits where no one person has been harmed a meaningful amount. How much legally-cognizable value did you lose from having P2P interrupted? Probably not enough to sue over. Without class action, comcast wouldn't be deterred from repeating this behavior and no one would get anything. I know $16 isn't much, but really how much do you think is reasonable for a few months of p2p interruption on a residential cable line?
You may be eligible for up to $16 restitution if you live in the United States or its Territories, have a current or former Comcast High-Speed Internet account, and either used or attempted to use Comcast service to use the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols at any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008
This is true and would break a lot of links. However, http://88.80.13.160/ would still work and -- more importantly -- revoking their URL would not only validate Wikileaks but also call forth the internet effect we call the Streisand Effect. This would probably be a godsend to the popularity of Wikileaks. Nothing builds street cred or grabs attention like religions, governments and service providers trying to knock you down repeatedly.
As a note, this has happened to wikileaks before, and the result was exactly as you describe. After the take down, news websites and forums exploded with the wikileaks IP address, and encouraged visitors to see what all the fuss was about. In addition, the judge had ordered the takedown of only wikileaks.org; wikileaks.net, wikileaks.co.uk, wikileaks.fr, wikileaks.cn, secure.ljsf.org, secure.sunshinepress.org, and dozens of other wikileaks websites with alternate names and identical content remained online.
I wonder what affect this would have on animal byproducts. Not stuff like hotdogs - which presumably can be manufactured the same way as the steaks - but products like leather or glue. If we're slaughtering a lot less animals, it stands to reason we won't have as much of the byproducts either. E.g. no more cheap leather for backpacks and shoes. Obviously that is a small concern relative to what's going on here, but I'm curious.
I had the same struggle with VNC. I tried remote desktop over hamachi, but that was just as bad. I stumbled on CrossLoop and haven't looked anywhere else. As the tech guy, you install a small local client and create a login. Those you want to help download and run a small stand-alone file, then tell you the "access code" prominently displayed in the window. You enter that code, and you've got access.
Not only that, but no device will ever be "perfectly safe." That phrase doesn't appear in TFA, it shouldn't have been put in the summary. If someone has to resort to Van Eck phreaking just to eavesdrop on polling because an open hacking competition yielded no vulnerabilities, it sounds pretty darn safe. Publicizing the vulnerability is still a good thing, maybe someone will be able to come up with a reasonable defense, but it doesn't sound like a showstopper to me.
Crap, the four asterisks - **** - should be the word gay. When writing the comment I was using both terms 'homosexual' and 'gay,' so I replaced both with asterisks to remind me to pick one word. I missed replacing the top asterisks with the word 'gay'.
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Those aren't the only bad parts of ACTA. Here are some more odious provisions, in my opinion:
* ACTA would impose the DMCA's "no circumventing DRM" clause everywhere
* ACTA imposes 3rd party liability for infringement everywhere (it already exists in the US & much of Europe)
* ACTA creates ISP safe harbors (plus notice & takedown), but raises the bar for qualification, e.g. ISPs must have some plan to curtail repeat infringement by subscribers
* ACTA offers statutory damages to copyright holder, as well as actual damages, and as Jammie Thomas can tell you, that wipes out any relevance to damage
* ACTA targets transferring pharmaceuticals across the border, which is mostly designed to get those going from Canada to the US
* ACTA requires criminal penalties for "willful" infringers, and their aiders/abettors, which is looser than the current US standard
* The forfeiture provision for large scale infringers is vague enough to possibly be a problem
* ACTA has broad
China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, New Zealand, & Japan really don't like it for a lot of reasons. To a some extent, the developing world doesn't like it because it would cost policing resources enforcing copyright/trademark when the resources are needed for more important activities, like stopping crimes. The US & Western Europe are the largest proponents.
You've stumbled onto the reason Larry Lessig left copyright reform to study government corruption.
Angle won't win because they won't have a suit. Righthaven, once recognizing their mark isn't an easy one, will drop Angle from the suit, and nothing will change.
This is true, but higher speeds may wear roads faster. As such, a surtax on fast driving may be appropriate - not from a safety perspective, but from a fairness in cost perspective.
My biggest problem is that support seems to wax and wane with actually moving songs/videos on and off an iPod with open source alternatives ... so that leaves me tied to the beast that is iTunes.
I had the same problem & concerns. I put rockbox on my iPod, and I haven't looked back. You literally just drag and drop music/videos/pictures on & off your ipod. No itunes, no random 4-string names, and far more features than the stock ipod firmware. When I put rockbox on my iPod photo/color, my iPod could now play videos!
There are downsides. You'll have to transcode ipod videos to mpeg. The menus are slower loading, it takes some twiddling to make the interface really look good, and I'm not enamored with the sleep behavior. But for me, it is well worth it to avoid iTunes and flaky 3rd party iPod loaders, not counting the new features.
As others have mentioned, you don't want to go down the rabbit hole of virtualization just to manage 20 computers in an office.
Altiris products are worth considering. The Client Management Suite is pretty terrific for managing lots of dissimilar clients. The rebranded "Backup Exec System Recovery Solution," doesn't do as much, but also works fine with different hardware clients. I haven't bought anything from them since Symantec bought them, but we loved Aliris before that.
If that's too rich for your blood, a SOHO WHS box may be enough to cover your windows machines. Ubuntu machines are easy, you could go as barebones as something like crontab, dd, gzip & rsync on an NFS share. Or you could do something fancier.
AMA licensing forces doctors to meet some minimal standard. It raises prices because we have fewer doctors, but I think most of us would gladly pay a little more for a doctor that is a little more competent. Tort reform is attractive, but the savings aren't as big as you'd think - $54B over 10 years. That isn't nothing, but these changes would make it harder to sue incompetent doctors who cause legitimate harm to others. So if we're going to break up the AMA licensing cartel, and rely on the free market to sift through good & bad doctors, then we'd want tort enhancement rather than limits.
The public option was a bad idea. This option would've been incredibly expensive for adverse selection, equity, and expertise reasons. It wouldn't drive down prices because cost problems aren't due to insurers choosing not to compete, they're in part due to divorcing real cost from consumers, and in part due to the cost of competing in more than one region. Medicaid & medicare already cover the most unfortunate (crappy systems though they are). Plus, the public option would give private insurers all the profitable customers, and make the feds pick up the tab for those who can't afford insurance or are high need. I do think everyone needs health insurance, but I don't like guaranteeing the health insurance industry's profitability.
I can't say whether rates will actually fall with this new bill, but here are the ideas.
* 1st - mandating insurance forces low risk people into the insurance pool. Young healthy individuals often skip expensive insurance because they're low risk. Forcing them to get coverage will lower overall premiums.
* 2nd - provisions in the bill to permit insurers to follow only one state's requirements - wherever the insurer is headquartered - will reduce administrative costs and encourage greater competition. Complying with 51 state laws is expensive. This change will also diffuse the ability of private interest groups to get state legislatures to mandate certain treatments to be covered.
* 3rd - prohibiting screening based on pre-existing conditions will reduce information gathering costs.
What I'd like to have seen would have included
* Require health care providers to charge the same price to everyone to reduce transaction/bargaining costs. Right now if I go to the hospital, and my insurer pays the bill, uninsured & underinsured individuals would pay much more for the same service because they don't have the bargaining power Blue Cross does.
* Stop giving employers deductions for offering health insurance. Employer-offered-insurance reduces consumer ability to investigate & pick a policy they want, and it divorces consumers from the true costs. Instead offer deductions for individual spending on health insurance.
* Permit insurers to offer catastrophic-only insurance. Because of state requirements of what an insurer must cover - which is a honeypot to treatment provider lobbyists - catastrophic only isn't an option. Even better if everyone was covered by the feds for catastrophic only, but that would be a political and logistic nightmare.
I agree that these patent suits are a waste of everyone's time and money, and we need a serious tightening of our novelty & nonobviousness standards. But I think you're mistaken as to how patent law works.
In copyright law, if you independently come up with something similar to another's copyrighted work, you're not infringing. Not so in patent law. If you independently create a patentable invention, that is substantially similar to an existing patent, practicing your invention would violate the existing patent. Even if you alter your invention so as to fall outside the scope of the existing patent, you may still be violating the patent under the doctrine of equivalents.
Does this make sense? I don't know. It avoids the nasty question of whether an invention was done independently - and copyright law hasn't been very favorable to those claiming independent creation. But it creates the nasty problem that it is hard to know if your invention's patent is valid and it is hard to know if you're infringing a prior patent.
Somewhat ironically, Google offers information on these patents - number 1 and number 2. Here's a more substantive article.
The bigger question is why not sue MSFT & as well - they're doing everything Yahoo & Google does. Perhaps Microsoft has many other patents they could use to retaliate against Xerox, something Google & Yahoo are a bit lighter on. Given these patents are more than a decade old, could Google & Yahoo make some sort of laches defense?
I'm not suggesting the US system doesn't need serious reform (it does), but comparing your good experience in the UK to what you think "would have" happened in the US is disingenuous. I've been to the hospital several times in the last two years, twice to the emergency room, and I've never waited more than 45 minutes. The emergency room copays were $20 and $50 (different insurance policies) and we've never paid more than $20 for drugs.
I recently read that controlling for the increased violence rate, higher obesity rate, and higher premature birth rate wipes out the difference, and puts the US square in the middle of European countries. I can dig up the journal article for you if you'd like to read it.
If I create a work and hold the copyright on that work, google has no right to provide copies of that work without my permission, and they cannot say, "you can opt out!". That's backwards according to long established law.
Google isn't just copying books and distributing them wholesale. Without publisher consent, they'll only show very brief snippets, well within fair use. Publishers can, and have, authorized google to show a few pages or show the entire book, but default is just a few lines. You, holding a copyright, can't veto a particular fair use just because it is on the internet. Whether the initial copy google makes to generate the snippets is fair use or not, that's a different and much closer question. That's also what google's settlement addresses in part.
Either way, opt out makes google books - and any large scanning project - dead in the water. You won't ever be able to include the massive number of orphaned works, you'll have huge publisher holdout problems, and only permitting google to scan a book once permission is received would destroy scale benefits and drive the costs so high we'd never see an online library.
It isn't like XP hasn't been updated since 2001, sometimes significantly so. The jump from XP to SP1 and SP2 to SP3 - seems more akin to a jump from woody to sarge or etch to lenny. SP3 was 2008, so I wouldn't say XP is really a 9-year-old OS.
I had a discussion about the G20 summit the other day with a rabid anti-globalist. This person was vehemently opposed to any international organizations as affronts to US sovereignty. The fear is that some US diplomat (maybe the president) can use international treaties to get results they couldn't get through the political process. In this discussion, it was suggested that Obama could ban guns and curb free speech in the US through an international treaty, although congress would never pass such a law. I have a similar discussion with another individual about this when a non-binding UN resolution came up which this person didn't like (strangely, it was about child trafficking).
I think this feeling is exists among nut jobs on both sides of the traditional political divide. Unfortunately, it is based on a gross misunderstanding of the American legal system. The G20, and globalization generally, provides lots of good reasons for concern, but generic fear of international agreements overriding US sovereignty is not one of them.
For America, there is no such thing as international law
International treaties and laws don't become binding on US citizens automatically, or just because the president signed them. All international agreements must be approved by congress and signed by the president before the agreement becomes binding on Americans.
Congress cannot give up law making power to any other body. For example, Congress couldn't pass a law that says "from now on, the UN can make laws for the US." It would be unconstitutional. Laws cannot be constructed so as to bypass either/both houses because of the bicameralism principle. For example, congress passed a bill which gave power over deportation to the inspector general, but retained a veto over his actions for one house of congress. The issue came up to the Supreme Court, and a one house veto was considered unconstitutional because of bicameralism. Laws cannot be constructed to pass the president either, because of the presentment principle. US diplomats and negotiators have agreed to countless international laws, only to have the proposed laws killed or modified beyond recognition in congress.
All "international laws" must become national law before they are enforceable. I don't know about other countries, but this is how the governmental system in the US works.
Unconstitutional agreements, even if they became law, would not pass SCOTUS
The Supreme Court had the power to review any law or action binding on a US citizen. They've already held the principles of bicameralism, presentment, and non-delegation of lawmaking powers are unconstitutional. A law in violation of one of these principles wouldn't even get to SCOTUS, it would be killed by a district court.
For the specific fears of the person I was talking with, SCOTUS has already held handgun bans unconstitutional. Even if somehow a gun ban got past congress & the president, the Supreme Court would strike it down immediately. Ditto for free speech, the Supreme Court has long pushed free speech jurisprudence beyond what was popular at the time. It was the Supreme Court striking down libel suits, media shutdowns, and restrictive speech laws. The Supreme Court has demonstrated ability and willingness to strike down unconstitutional laws & actions
In sum, the president can't act unilaterally, the Supreme Court can strike down any law or government action abridging constitutional rights, and this broad fear of international agreement or cooperation is irrational and unfounded.
As a side note, the response to my argument was, "well I guess we have nothing to fear, like when the IMF sacked Argentina." I don't know enough to evaluate the truth of that statement, but it doesn't matter. My statement was about US citizens fearing a loss of US sovereignty to international cooperation, not about Argentina being rescued by the IMF.
Again, there are lots of good reasons to worry about the
My wife called it "dances with wolves" meets "fern gully" in 200 years. I thought some of the plant & animal life was really clever. I was also really glad they didn't try to make all the novel things logical - they never attempted an explanation of the flying rocks, which I think is good. The planetary neural network idea has been done an awful lot, but I think it worked just fine. The word unobtainium is still utterly ridiculous (seriously guys?), but it wasn't featured too prominently.
The aliens are still too stiff, their faces are too uniform, their movements are too smooth - they need pores, facial hair, creases, loose skin, etc - but it is still the best I've seen. Some of the new humaniod features were imaginative, like the neural connection in the pony tail, but overall the alients were pretty standard - "good" aliens must look human for us to identify with them, they must have the same mannerisms (e.g. identical emotions), and other real differences must be superficial. For example, the aliens were more like humans than the Indians in "Dances with Wolves" were like Costner, a movie which shares a number of connections with Avatar. I suppose if I want imaginative, I should just go watch La planète sauvage.
Overall though, I think this movie marks the latest in the "spectacle over plot" shift in filmmaking. Cameron has always been at the forefront of this change, right there with Michael Bay, so I should've expected it, but so it goes. Avatar did have a lot more plot than Transformers, GI Joe, and some other recently popular films, but it was still simpler than the Cat in the Hat - subtle & not-so-subtle political statements notwithstanding. Between visual effect and good writing, I'll take the latter, but why can't we have both?
You're right, there is no binding precedent or permanent injunction, but a ruling can go either way - comcast could have gotten permission to screw with their network in the future. Of course a settlement isn't as good as a favorable ruling, but it does signal to others that they can expect meddling to cost $16M and a lot of bad publicity. Plus, the incident brought the FCC down on this kind of behavior, so ISPs have that to worry about too.
Comcast is not immunized from further suits. As long as you don't take part in the settlement, you can still sue them individually. Alternately, although it is unlikely a judge will certify another class over the same issue, it has happened before (see asbestos lawsuits).
Class actions let you bring suits where no one person has been harmed a meaningful amount. How much legally-cognizable value did you lose from having P2P interrupted? Probably not enough to sue over. Without class action, comcast wouldn't be deterred from repeating this behavior and no one would get anything. I know $16 isn't much, but really how much do you think is reasonable for a few months of p2p interruption on a residential cable line?
As a note, this has happened to wikileaks before, and the result was exactly as you describe. After the take down, news websites and forums exploded with the wikileaks IP address, and encouraged visitors to see what all the fuss was about. In addition, the judge had ordered the takedown of only wikileaks.org; wikileaks.net, wikileaks.co.uk, wikileaks.fr, wikileaks.cn, secure.ljsf.org, secure.sunshinepress.org, and dozens of other wikileaks websites with alternate names and identical content remained online.
I wonder what affect this would have on animal byproducts. Not stuff like hotdogs - which presumably can be manufactured the same way as the steaks - but products like leather or glue. If we're slaughtering a lot less animals, it stands to reason we won't have as much of the byproducts either. E.g. no more cheap leather for backpacks and shoes. Obviously that is a small concern relative to what's going on here, but I'm curious.
I had the same struggle with VNC. I tried remote desktop over hamachi, but that was just as bad. I stumbled on CrossLoop and haven't looked anywhere else. As the tech guy, you install a small local client and create a login. Those you want to help download and run a small stand-alone file, then tell you the "access code" prominently displayed in the window. You enter that code, and you've got access.
Not only that, but no device will ever be "perfectly safe." That phrase doesn't appear in TFA, it shouldn't have been put in the summary. If someone has to resort to Van Eck phreaking just to eavesdrop on polling because an open hacking competition yielded no vulnerabilities, it sounds pretty darn safe. Publicizing the vulnerability is still a good thing, maybe someone will be able to come up with a reasonable defense, but it doesn't sound like a showstopper to me.
Ask and ye shall receive. By the way, this clip comes from InfoMania which is an awesome show.
All the obvious product placement and subtle placement in trashy reality shows ("lets 'bing' it") probably haven't hurt either.
Crap, the four asterisks - **** - should be the word gay. When writing the comment I was using both terms 'homosexual' and 'gay,' so I replaced both with asterisks to remind me to pick one word. I missed replacing the top asterisks with the word 'gay'.