Because, my friends, Microsoft is now going to spends billions to kill the current patent system.
No, they'll just pay to help put caps on jury-awards. That way they can still use the patent laws to bankrupt/stifle small companies/open source advocates who might be competition, but not worry about being put out of business because they ran roughshod over someone else's patent.
"A convicted criminal does not have the same rights a citizen, that is the way our justice system works."
only in a narrowly defined way. no voting, no gun ownership, etc...
I can understand why someone who has demonstrated a willingness to abuse weapons (I guess that would be abuse people with weapons) should be denied from having them, but I've never understand why they should be denied a vote. It seems like the right to vote should be one of those "fundamental" rights that cannot be denied to anyone.
To me, being able to deny law-breakers the right to vote seems like a perfect way to disenfranchise a big chunk of the lower "class" of society. You don't want someone to have a voice? Define sets of laws that it is almost impossible for them NOT to break, then take away their right to vote. Justify it as punishing "bad" people.
Why not let convicts vote? If society is healthy, then there shouldn't be too many convicts, and their votes won't make a bit of difference in the first place. If there _are_ so many convicts that their votes regularly make a difference in voting results - well, that indicates more of a problem with society's legal system rather than an "unexplained rash of criminal activity". Requiring that convicts be allowed to vote would provide a form of electoral feedback which would keep legislators from passing ever-restrictive legislation which only benefits a smaller & more well-off part of the society.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really think even the NSA is _that_ far ahead of commercial process technology. It's more likely that they do custom designs for whatever applications they need, which allows them to process their data much faster than any general-purpose setup.
SDI worked and is working just fine for what it was supposed to do: 1. cause the Soviet Union to spend so much money on "catch up" that it would eventually collapse -> successful, and 2. give lots of money to favored defenese contractors -> still ongoing.
The supposed "goal" of being able to shoot ballistic missiles out of the sky is just a red herring presented for the benefit of an ignorant (and apathetic) public.
The 5th amendment is a restriction on the government, not on the people. Therefore, the government can't ignore it when they want to (although the courts seem to have done a pretty good job at weaseling out of a lot of the absolute wording of the Constitution & Bill of Rights).
The DMCA is a restriction (of dubious constitutionality) by the government on the people, and as such, the government can make exceptions to it if it deems necessary to enforce the law.
Yes, receiving anonymously is fairly easy (if you use a server that doesn't keep download records), but sending anonymously is somewhat more difficult.
Not really. I'm not sure if they still exist, but there were plenty of email-to-USENET gateways around a while back. Combine that with the one-directional-only "Mixmaster" email anonymization networks, it's pretty easy to post stuff on the newsgroups with almost absolute anonymity.
However, over the years, the government has slowly castrated the second amendment, insidiously changing its interpretation to guarantee ownership of little more than peashooters, while reserving the real hardware for the "good guys" (i.e., the military). Nowadays, citizens are not allowed to own anywhere near the same firepower as the military.
The only real protection that the "average citizen" has against the military (and the more heavily armed members of law enforcement) is that most of the members of those organizations are "regular Joes". If they were ordered to commit a wholesale massacre on US citizenry, it would be more than likely that they'd arrest the person giving such orders.
Most dictators/oligarchs & such take a fair bit of effort to build up an elite military/police force with loyalty ties mainly to them (isolating the force from the public), which they can then use to intimidate the public.
On the other hand, even though our current forces won't follow drastic orders like "enslave the public", they probably won't do much to stop a gradual erosion of everyone's civil liberties. I highly doubt that personal ownership of firearms also stops erosion of civil liberties, either, and in fact, taken too far, is far more likely to convince law enforcement to reduce civil liberties.
Really, the only realistic way of stopping the erosion of civil liberties is to constantly monitor the state of said liberties, and to unleash electoral retribution on any politicians stupid enough to ignore their REAL constituency.
My impression of the whole reason for the "jury-by-peer" system is to make sure that decisions by laws are actually made because common members of the public agreed with them (the law makes sense to a group of "typical" individuals), and that it was actually a duty of the jury to deliberately ignore a law (jury nullification) if they think it is unreasonable in a particular instance.
If a majority of the population decides that it isn't "right" to pay for food, then the minority is not going to be able to force them to pay for the food, no matter how "right" the minority thinks it is.
Of course, the majority will then have to deal with the situation that they will have to prepare all their food for themselves, since not many people will prepare food for them for free. With a reality check like that, the majority may change its mind without the need for force - but it will be because the majority sees that it is in its own best interest to change its mind, not because it was forced to
Even if I were suffering massive organ failure all over my body and were going to die tomorrow, I would refuse to accept any tainted organs known to have been previously used by a spammer.
That'd be a great thing... you could get security features without them trying to ram "upgrades" like DRM down your throat then!
Errrr...not really... DRM is any will probably be considered to be a "security update" to prevent users from copying things they shouldn't be able to. Any kind of "upgrade" like that has to be made mandatory, otherwise no one except the extremely gullible will want it.
Do you really think people are going to be approaching one at a time?
I personally think it would be more "dogpile" - climbing over seats as necessary - especially if the passengers become SO afraid for their lives that they pass into an "enraged" state.
In that situation, a machete or even a handgun (if you could get either on the plane) would only incapacitate a limited number of passengers before the weapons are rendered ineffective - even with a "highly trained" team. You'd need a team large enough to be comparable in size to the rest of the passengers on the plane - if you don't, the passengers will bury them with their bodies if nothing else.
Don't go messing with the technology of your passport. You could end up in the Federal pen.
Like organized crime is really worried about that.
And why in the world would anyone tell the authorities that they were trying to reverse engineer the passport when they come to get a new one because they mangled the 1st one during the reverse-engineering process?
"What happened to your old passport?" "My kid threw it in the fireplace."
Well, if your search engine returns nothing but porn, then that will probably satisfy most people's requests. And for the people who are unhappy with the results: "I was looking for a flower distributor!" AI: "But you were THINKING about sex, you naughty person!"
(Of course, for kids, the AI would return links to "educational" information.)
Well, bring back dueling. If everybody (or a significant fraction) was armed, we'd return to being a more polite society.
Unfortunately, this would just result in people who were good at killing other people surviving, whereas people who weren't so good at it (perhaps since they were studying something else, like engineering) getting killed. And I highly doubt that the people who were good at killing would feel the need to be particularly polite to everyone else.
We need to allow private citizens to arm themselves. This will make violent crime more dangerous to the criminal, reducing the numbers of such crimes and the numbers of such criminals.
This only works well if you trust most of the private citizens to act in rational, intelligent ways. For those of us who believe that the "typical" US private citizen has to repress the impulse to blow your head off if you look at them funny, I am greatly in favor of restricting gun ownership to those who have proven themselves psychologically-stable enough to deserve such a privilege.
what i do know is the republicans push the idea of "smaller government"
You know, it's weird - the Republicans _talk_ about smaller government, but the latest Bush administration has done a damn good job of increasing the size of it like crazy - and trying to do it without paying for any of it (yet), by increasing the government's debt load by humongous amounts.
On top of that, they're not spending most of the money they're borrowing from the future on stuff that actually helps the "little" people - like education, police & fire protection, etc - you know, things that might actually help people at the bottom w/o requiring massive welfare payouts. Instead, they (both the Administration & the members of Congress) hand out subsidies to large corporations, give lots of money to large defense contractors, etc.
Not that I'm saying the Democrats are any better - they tend to pay lip service to populist issues, while feeding the government bureaucracy. At the moment, though, the Republicans are in "power" and are exploiting the situation as much as they possibly can.
And I get tired of the "argument" that the store owner _deserves_ to control sales of the "magically-duplicating" chocolate bar.
Usually, when a business model stops working, a _real_ entrepreneur finds another business model that does (say, by offering _real_ goods & services instead of depending on a government-granted monopoly over the distribution of information).
There might be some room for argument about using government to ease the transition, but the government shouldn't be used to maintain an unprofitable business model indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they'll just pay to help put caps on jury-awards. That way they can still use the patent laws to bankrupt/stifle small companies/open source advocates who might be competition, but not worry about being put out of business because they ran roughshod over someone else's patent.
I can understand why someone who has demonstrated a willingness to abuse weapons (I guess that would be abuse people with weapons) should be denied from having them, but I've never understand why they should be denied a vote. It seems like the right to vote should be one of those "fundamental" rights that cannot be denied to anyone.
To me, being able to deny law-breakers the right to vote seems like a perfect way to disenfranchise a big chunk of the lower "class" of society. You don't want someone to have a voice? Define sets of laws that it is almost impossible for them NOT to break, then take away their right to vote. Justify it as punishing "bad" people.
Why not let convicts vote? If society is healthy, then there shouldn't be too many convicts, and their votes won't make a bit of difference in the first place. If there _are_ so many convicts that their votes regularly make a difference in voting results - well, that indicates more of a problem with society's legal system rather than an "unexplained rash of criminal activity". Requiring that convicts be allowed to vote would provide a form of electoral feedback which would keep legislators from passing ever-restrictive legislation which only benefits a smaller & more well-off part of the society.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really think even the NSA is _that_ far ahead of commercial process technology. It's more likely that they do custom designs for whatever applications they need, which allows them to process their data much faster than any general-purpose setup.
Don't forget a really important point: it's illegal for telemarketers to call you on your cell phone.
SDI worked and is working just fine for what it was supposed to do: 1. cause the Soviet Union to spend so much money on "catch up" that it would eventually collapse -> successful, and 2. give lots of money to favored defenese contractors -> still ongoing.
The supposed "goal" of being able to shoot ballistic missiles out of the sky is just a red herring presented for the benefit of an ignorant (and apathetic) public.
Actually, that would probably speed up the tech call quite a bit.
The 5th amendment is a restriction on the government, not on the people. Therefore, the government can't ignore it when they want to (although the courts seem to have done a pretty good job at weaseling out of a lot of the absolute wording of the Constitution & Bill of Rights).
The DMCA is a restriction (of dubious constitutionality) by the government on the people, and as such, the government can make exceptions to it if it deems necessary to enforce the law.
Not really. I'm not sure if they still exist, but there were plenty of email-to-USENET gateways around a while back. Combine that with the one-directional-only "Mixmaster" email anonymization networks, it's pretty easy to post stuff on the newsgroups with almost absolute anonymity.
The DMCA does not apply when it is being used to protect illegal activity.
The only real protection that the "average citizen" has against the military (and the more heavily armed members of law enforcement) is that most of the members of those organizations are "regular Joes". If they were ordered to commit a wholesale massacre on US citizenry, it would be more than likely that they'd arrest the person giving such orders.
Most dictators/oligarchs & such take a fair bit of effort to build up an elite military/police force with loyalty ties mainly to them (isolating the force from the public), which they can then use to intimidate the public.
On the other hand, even though our current forces won't follow drastic orders like "enslave the public", they probably won't do much to stop a gradual erosion of everyone's civil liberties. I highly doubt that personal ownership of firearms also stops erosion of civil liberties, either, and in fact, taken too far, is far more likely to convince law enforcement to reduce civil liberties.
Really, the only realistic way of stopping the erosion of civil liberties is to constantly monitor the state of said liberties, and to unleash electoral retribution on any politicians stupid enough to ignore their REAL constituency.
Interesting; I wonder how that gets allowed?
My impression of the whole reason for the "jury-by-peer" system is to make sure that decisions by laws are actually made because common members of the public agreed with them (the law makes sense to a group of "typical" individuals), and that it was actually a duty of the jury to deliberately ignore a law (jury nullification) if they think it is unreasonable in a particular instance.
If a majority of the population decides that it isn't "right" to pay for food, then the minority is not going to be able to force them to pay for the food, no matter how "right" the minority thinks it is.
Of course, the majority will then have to deal with the situation that they will have to prepare all their food for themselves, since not many people will prepare food for them for free. With a reality check like that, the majority may change its mind without the need for force - but it will be because the majority sees that it is in its own best interest to change its mind, not because it was forced to
Getting a tapeworm might be like putting yourself on a severely calorie-restricted diet - which would probably extend your lifespan quite a bit.
Even if I were suffering massive organ failure all over my body and were going to die tomorrow, I would refuse to accept any tainted organs known to have been previously used by a spammer.
Errrr...not really... DRM is any will probably be considered to be a "security update" to prevent users from copying things they shouldn't be able to. Any kind of "upgrade" like that has to be made mandatory, otherwise no one except the extremely gullible will want it.
Do you really think people are going to be approaching one at a time?
I personally think it would be more "dogpile" - climbing over seats as necessary - especially if the passengers become SO afraid for their lives that they pass into an "enraged" state.
In that situation, a machete or even a handgun (if you could get either on the plane) would only incapacitate a limited number of passengers before the weapons are rendered ineffective - even with a "highly trained" team. You'd need a team large enough to be comparable in size to the rest of the passengers on the plane - if you don't, the passengers will bury them with their bodies if nothing else.
Like organized crime is really worried about that.
And why in the world would anyone tell the authorities that they were trying to reverse engineer the passport when they come to get a new one because they mangled the 1st one during the reverse-engineering process?
"What happened to your old passport?" "My kid threw it in the fireplace."
Well, if your search engine returns nothing but porn, then that will probably satisfy most people's requests. And for the people who are unhappy with the results: "I was looking for a flower distributor!" AI: "But you were THINKING about sex, you naughty person!"
(Of course, for kids, the AI would return links to "educational" information.)
Unfortunately, this would just result in people who were good at killing other people surviving, whereas people who weren't so good at it (perhaps since they were studying something else, like engineering) getting killed. And I highly doubt that the people who were good at killing would feel the need to be particularly polite to everyone else.
Wouldn't that break your arm every time you fired it?
This only works well if you trust most of the private citizens to act in rational, intelligent ways. For those of us who believe that the "typical" US private citizen has to repress the impulse to blow your head off if you look at them funny, I am greatly in favor of restricting gun ownership to those who have proven themselves psychologically-stable enough to deserve such a privilege.
Well, according to the federal government, encryption is defined as a form of "munitions", so would encryption be considered "arms"?
You know, it's weird - the Republicans _talk_ about smaller government, but the latest Bush administration has done a damn good job of increasing the size of it like crazy - and trying to do it without paying for any of it (yet), by increasing the government's debt load by humongous amounts.
On top of that, they're not spending most of the money they're borrowing from the future on stuff that actually helps the "little" people - like education, police & fire protection, etc - you know, things that might actually help people at the bottom w/o requiring massive welfare payouts. Instead, they (both the Administration & the members of Congress) hand out subsidies to large corporations, give lots of money to large defense contractors, etc.
Not that I'm saying the Democrats are any better - they tend to pay lip service to populist issues, while feeding the government bureaucracy. At the moment, though, the Republicans are in "power" and are exploiting the situation as much as they possibly can.
So I take it you're _not_ in favor of intellectual "property" laws?
And I get tired of the "argument" that the store owner _deserves_ to control sales of the "magically-duplicating" chocolate bar.
Usually, when a business model stops working, a _real_ entrepreneur finds another business model that does (say, by offering _real_ goods & services instead of depending on a government-granted monopoly over the distribution of information).
There might be some room for argument about using government to ease the transition, but the government shouldn't be used to maintain an unprofitable business model indefinitely.