You don't really need to know the details of the law. If the law conflicts with what the judge wants to do, then so much the worse for the law. Don't count on appeals, either - you probably can't afford one or didn't have a court reporter at the trial and anyway, it's just asking another judge to express contempt for a colleague. The purpose of the maze of laws is not to direct what must be done, but to ensure that you will hire a lawyer to figure it out.
Here is a rough guide which is more accurate than the law at predicting who will win in courts: 1.Federal government 2.State Government 3.Banks 4.Multinational Corporations 5.High level VIPs 6.Local government 7.Other corporations 8.Mid-level VIPs 9.Pretty women 10.Women 11.Men 12.Lower-class people
The greater the difference in level, the more certain that the outcome will go to the higher rank. If in a state court and only one of the parties is in-state, move the in-state party up 1 or 2 notches. You get about 1 notch for each 25% by which your legal bill exceeds the other party. You lose 1-2 notches for being clearly in the wrong. Other easily-spotted exceptional circumstances can move a party up or down the list, as well.
I agree for the most part, except that I think that the likelihood that the majority will figure it out is quite slim. The public education system has manufactured enough stupidity and inculcated enough belief in the powerlessness of individuals to ensure that that won't happen. The echo chamber of corporate media controls the terms of debate for both the masses and 95% of the nominal elites anyway.
The practical ability to mount a revolt had already been managed out of existence sometime between 1910 and Roosevelt's second term. (H.L. Mencken is a good guide to the history of that process. Gatto's Underground History of American Education, especially chapters 9 and 15, also has a great deal of information about the methods of mass control.)
The Patriot Act - no, let's not give them that control over language - rather, the Police State Act is just a manifestation of the natural amoral imperative of all organizations to expand their dominion by any means available. Its purpose is to provide the State justification and cover for using the power they already had to crush whomever might get in their way. The jack-boots are not too worried about mass movements, since they have the ability to strangle most such movements in the crib. Those that might slip through will have their votes counted on these rigged machines, as you said. It's a belt-and-suspenders approach that shows every sign of being successful so far.
So, no, don't take off your tinfoil hat unless you think it might just be enhancing your radar signature.;|
Thanks for the answer. Patenting to prove that you have the right to make your own designs is even more paranoid than I am - and that's a compliment.
Truth is, we're already inside the event horizon for a totalitarian state - neither 1984 nor Brave New World but with roughly the governance of the former and the opinion control of the latter. I think the only way we can escape as a society is to jettison the mass of the administrators, ad-men and assorted ass-kissers downward at high velocity.
Yep. You're right. I was simply giving some quotes that more eloquently expressed the mood of the post to which I was reponding. However, the other response to your post is also correct - guerilla tactics have worked against big armies in the past. Getting the critical mass needed would be difficult these days, though. Anything less than a full takeover would just make the State stronger and more ruthless. On the other hand, with encryption, steganography and a modern cell-structure for limiting damage from infiltrators, securing communications and coordinating action would be easier than ever before. This is theoretical, though. We are a long way from running out of decent, nonviolent options.
Guerilla tactics and organization can be even more effectively applied to non-military objectives. An excellent target would be gaining control of the the strategic state Republican and Democratic party organizations through covert but legal means. Then choose what choice of candidates will be offered, and use broad-based overt online organization to rock the primaries of both parties. With enough power in the state and Federal legislatures, the legacy of tortured legal opinions and case law can be swept away and the Constitution restored.
Another essential target would be to use laws (assuming that taking over the parties is as easy as I think) or perhaps more covert methods (and I'm not sure what those would be) to bring the large corporations and foundations to heel. Those organizations have effective control of the media, which in turn shape policy and public opinion.
In surprisingly short order it may be possible to undo much of the damage that has been done to the American mind and make this country freer than it ever was before.
Think of the military-industrial/political-media-education complex as just another system to be hacked, and like-minded citizens can indeed retake control of the nation.
If a company can move production to a country where the labor rates are $0.15/hr with no benefits and no employment taxes, can do essentially whatever they want to the workers, and can dump the toxic waste wherever they please, then that company will be able to sell goods here cheaper while still making a higher profit than a company that pays a good wage in the US and obeys US laws. US consumers get cheaper widgets, the offshoring company makes more sales at a higher margin, and the foreign workers get jobs slightly better than what they would otherwise have.
However US workers lose the jobs that went overseas, the company that kept its production in the US goes out of business and all its workers lose their jobs, and if this happens enough, in the long run the US workers can't afford to buy widgets anymore, the offshoring company goes out of business and the foreign workers are out of their shitty jobs - but now their environment is poisoned, too. Of course the situation is more complicated than that- you will get economic instability, current account deficits, greater wealth inequalities within both countries, and other effects - but that's the gist of it.
In absolute numbers there are far more Asians who are sufficiently smart, skilled and knowledgeable for almost any given job than there are Americans. If the labor market were completely free, there would be no reason for Americans to earn more than those Asians. This is good news for the Asians and bad news for Americans. Similar arguments apply to the other countries in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Once you realize that free trade only works for us if we have something to trade, and we don't actually make much in the way of physical goods anymore, the economic necessity of geting the IP restrictions in the treaty becomes obvious. Neal Stephenson put it a lot better than I:
When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here...once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all the historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
And pizza gets cold when delivered intercontinentally.
"Now working for myself, and have several patents in the mill."
How did you manage to afford the PTO and lawyer fees, if you don't mind me asking? I've wanted to patent some ideas for a long time but the cost always seemed prohibitive. Not to mention the fact that a patent is just a license to sue, so if you can't come up with some hundreds of thousands of dollars for litigation you just have to count on the kindness not just of strangers, but of corporations.
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty....
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy
*
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.
- William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar (Casca at I, iii)
Franklin was a printer in an era when copy restrictions in America were essentially nonexistent. Newspapers like the one he wrote for as a boy depended on copying from one another. He trained himself to write well by cutting up copies of Addison and Steele, rewording each line, casting them in verse and translating back to prose: rip-mix-burn 1700s-style. Franklin was in trouble with the law in Boston for saying things the powers that be did not approve of, so he was sensitive to government restrictions on the press. On the other hand, he was a bestselling author every year after he started publishing Poor Richard's Almanac, so he understood the advantages of copyright.
Franklin would care very much about copyright and would see it from more than one angle. He would be appalled at the abuses of prisoners as well, likely more so than IP law, but there is no doubt that he would consider the right to publish and to make fair use of published materials essential liberties.
You are dead-on. The people who really decide things have been Hegelians for a long time now, and one of the implications of applying that philosophy is the need to manage both the thesis and the antithesis if you want to control the synthesis. The more sturm und drang created in the fight between the two sides, the more certain the control. Everyone looks at the fight rather than elsewhere. Which side one picks doesn't really matter, and the undecideds have been trained to think that "the truth lies somewhere in the middle" on topics of controversy.
The people who set up the false choices are the only ones with real choices. This control is excercised by offering or threatening to pull advertising in the for-profit media, and using foundation dollars the same way for the non-profits.
Maybe so - but we got by in 1939 on $51E9 in today's money for the military. We have some more obligations now, but the War Department budget could realistically get down to $100-150E9 within five years if there were the political will to do so. That would erase the deficit and likely leave quite a bit left over. We'd have to pull out of a few dozen countries, maybe, but that's all to the good. The real dividend would come from freeing up a lot of engineers and other highly able people to work in industries which actually produce goods rather than ills.
I hope we eventually eliminate the standing army entirely, which would return to the original vision of this country shown in the Constitutional limitation of Army appropriations to two years. Unfortunately the oligopoly that owns and operates the country thinks America should be a world empire.
To avoid giving the impression that that is the official view of the Washington Times editorial board, the byline reads: TODAY'S COLUMNIST By Martin L. Fackler July 29, 2005.
The bit I think you are referring to does not mean what you say it does:
BLITZER: But the other argument that's been made against you is that you've sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you've tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.
What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?
WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.
In other words she had been outed, thus she was no longer clandestine. The interview continues:
BLITZER: But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?
WILSON: That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department.
He can't talk about specifics that touch on still-classified information. But he can say that the CIA believed a crime had been committed and let you draw your own conclusions.
Earlier in the article he repeated another statement by the CIA which makes it even more clear that Plame was an undercover CIA officer:
BLITZER: And you've denied that your wife was the one who came up with the idea to send you
WILSON: It's not so much that I've denied it. It was the CIA itself that denied it a week after the Novak article came out, well before I was ever in a position to acknowledge that my wife worked for the CIA.
And indeed, regrettably, the staff at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence did not call the CIA to find out their official position. But a year before, "Newsday" reporters Knut Royce and Tim Phelps did, and this is what the CIA told them:
"A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked alongside the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment.
"They" -- the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story -- "were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising. There are people elsewhere in the government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up for some reason. I can't figure out who it would be."
Just for fun here are some more quotes from the same interview demonstrating that it is ridiculous to believe that Wilson is a Democratic stooge or that Karl Rove was not trying to smear Plame:
BLITZER:Let's talk a little bit about the politics of this. On September 30, 2003, you were quoted in the "Washington Post" as saying, "at the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
That's almost two years ago you were saying Karl Rove should be arrested. On the basis of what were you saying it then?
WILSON: Well, it was a statement that I'd made at a meeting in Seattle. And as my wife later told me, she thought I'd gone a little over the top, so I took the handcuffs off. But I believed then and I believe now that -- and I know that Karl Rove was, in fact, engaged in pushing the Novak story, including calling a reporter and saying, "Wilson's wife is fair game."
I find that to be an outrageous abuse of power from a senior White House official, certainly worthy of frog-marching out of the White House. In handcuffs? Probably not. Out of handcuffs? Certainly.
BLITZER: But you don't want to name that reporter who told you that?
Well, spoofing is illegal unless you are doing it for a legit reson. My wireless ISP uses MAC authentication only and is very difficult to reach to get a MAC change. When my card turned out to be junk, I replaced it with a Belkin and programmed the old MAC in. When I told the ISP about it later, the guy was quite surprised - he had no idea that was possible. They still have not upgraded their security or acess control method.:(
When I tried to find out from the local Apple store how to change the MAC so a visitor staying at my place could connect to the network, the arrogant child at the service and repair desk refused to believe it was possible on any card.
Here's something back on topic: The New Scientist reports:
Newly disclosed observations of the giant world revealed on Friday to orbit in the outer solar system show that it has a moon....
The moon is not the first discovered around a Kuiper Belt object, but it is the smallest, only about 1% the mass of 2003 EL61. More importantly, observations of the satellite's 49-day orbit allowed Brown to precisely calculate the masses of both 2003 EL61 and its moon.
Brown's results - posted on his website - show the object is about 32% as massive as Pluto. Assuming its composition is similar, that implies its diameter is about 70% of Pluto's, or about 1600 kilometres. That would probably make it larger than Sedna, an object beyond the Kuiper Belt discovered earlier by Brown's group.
Michael E. Brown, a Caltech professor and one of the original observers of the planetwrites:
As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.
In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.
Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.
By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together a press
Best E-voting Bill Reintroduced - Lend Your Support!
Verify the Vote In 2004, thousands of EFF activists helped Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (VCIAA, HB 550) garner immense support before the session ended. The bill contains several critically important election reforms, including the requirement of a paper audit trail for all electronic voting machines, random audits, and public availability of all code used in elections. HB 550 was reintroduced in February, and it currently has over 130 bipartisan cosponsors.
The momentum is on our side, and it's more important than ever to ask your representative to support this bill since many counties across the country are choosing voting equipment now. Tell Congress to stand up for election reform!
There is a link on the EFF page so you can send a canned or customized letter of support for this bill to your Senators and representative.
You forget that Lindh was fighting the heroin lordds of the Northern Alliance (who were our enemies at the time) when he was captured, and had joined the Taliban before the US went to war against them. Not to mention that the government had to drop nearly all charges against him due to lack of evidence, not lenience.
If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
The problem is that the realm of "Constitutionally protected" is growing smaller and smaller.
*Gag orders by courts, which often hide unjust or even illegal acts *"National security" secrets that have nothing to do with anything other than covering up mistakes or even crimes. *Regulations prohibiting mentioning certain words at airport security checkpoints. Saying "I don't have a bomb" will often get you detained and your checked luggage blown up. *"Free speech areas" which are simply cages for dissidents *Prohibitions on making legal arguments or even mentioning certain statutes in court - see the case of Peter McWilliams for an example. There are certain legal arguments which by themselves are punished by fines in Tax Court. *Conspiracy statutes in which even discussing matters the government does not approve have been construed to be felonies. *Obscenity and pornography laws - if someone under the age of 18 takes a provocative photograph of him/herself, he or she may be arrested for child porn and sent to an adult prison. Not to mention the prohibition on "indecent" speech or pictures on the public airwaves. *IIRC, organizations which the AG disapproves of, even based solely on their rhetoric, may be declared "terrorist" and the citizenship of their members revoked. *Laws against publishing technical information which could be used to create restricted-use weapons, or substances. (Drugs and explosives, mostly.) *Decisions holding that the system of index numbers universally used to refer to court decisions and statutes is owned by a private company who can restrict its use. (Westlaw) *The State can prohibit or punish any speech by students which it deems "disruptive", even though the students are compelled by law to attend. This is sometimes extended to cover speech off school grounds.
Those are just the big ones - here are a few other, lesser or older infringements: *Prohibitions on privately funded birth-control and abortion information for clinics that receive any government money, no matter how little. *Reaching further back, try reading up on Anthony Comstock's governmental crusade against anything that offended Victorian morality being sent through the mails. Or the alien and sedition acts. *Infringements on the doctrine of fair use. *Monitoring library computers and books checked out. *Anti-flag burning laws which only apply to symbolic acts, not honorable disposal of worn-out flags. *Soon, if the proposal goes through, differential taxation of speech and images which offend Congressmen. If that isn't struck down, expect expansions to other speech which is inconvenient for our current representatives. *Limitations on publishing code which infringes on an earlier-filed but unpublished patent. *Trademark dilution and infringement judgements against people using common words in the English language.
Read it again: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The executive (in this case the S.S.) is only there to carry out the laws passed by Congress. If there is no legitimate law they are enforcing, they are merely criminals. According to the 1st Amendment, Congress may make NO LAW in any way abridging the freedom to speak, peaceably assemble, or petition and that includes abridgements such as when and where the people choose to do so. How can anyone say that one is still being allowed their right to simultaneously assemble, speak and petition the President when they are not allowed within a mile of him?
"Which search is unreasonable?" The search of your urine for drug metabolites. Also, I know that employers are not yet bound to respect all the rights of the Constitution, 14th Amendment or no, but in Georgia, for instance, one can be cut off from the unemployment benefits which one has already paid for if one refuses to take a pre-employment drug screen. Other laws make it clear that the piss tests are conducted with State connivance and thus are subject to the limitations of the Bill of Rights.
"where is that listed" See the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution. It is a natural right not enumerated in the Constitution. For proof of its validity, assume the contrary of the primary right - that people has no right to think whatever they please. You can see where that leads, can't you? (If not, then I might as well be talking to the proverbial wall.) Since some thoughts and indeed ways of thinking are unavailable without drugs, and those thoughts and ways of thinking are within the natural rights of man, therefore the drugs needed to achieve those mental states are likewise protected. I am aware that the US courts disagree with me. Our difference of opinion is due to the fact that I am right and they are wrong.
"does not include infringing the rights of others" Taking drugs such as marijuana, morphine, or MDMA does not infringe the rights of others any more than meditating or eating chocolate.
"Who's restricting your right to control your bodily fluids?" The employers in the US with encouragement and sometimes requirement of the US and state governments.
"You have no right not to be discrriminated [sic] against." Obviously false, and in any event unresponsive to what I wrote. The outcome of the drug test has no bearing on an applicant's ability to do the job. Off-the-job use of the Valium, the drug most commonly flagged in piss tests, may even improve abilities on the job. Try again.
"You have no right to dignity" Bullshit. You have the right to maintain the dignity which all human beings are presumed to have; you have the right not to be forced to accept humiliation in order to secure the basic necessities of life.
*
I will endeavor to ignore further trolling from lp-habu.
How about the right to be secure against unreasonable searches? The right to regulate one's own mental state by any means, (which is a collary of the right to think however one pleases)? The right to control one's own bodily fluids? The right not to be discriminated against on the basis of unreliable tests for activities that are unproven to correspond with ability to do the job? The right to human dignity?
I can't believe what bootlicking lackeys Americans have become. Free country - my ass! If a prospective employer wants you to give a urine sample, oblige them - but throw it in that loathsome petty tyrant's face!
The original creator has the right to choose whether or not to publish or disclose his or her ideas. Once he or she has conveyed the work to others, however, the force needed to prevent others from doing he same is a privilege, not a right.
Society acting in its own interest will limit those privileges to the minimum required to encourage creation and publication. Any excess privilege is state-enforced theft from every individual who is forced to pay for what is the natural property and heritage of humankind.
I don't know which is more disturbing - the fact that this man and the one in Florida have been prosecuted, or the way that so many cowardly Slashdotters are unwilling to stick up for the rights of computer users. These prosecutions have nothing to do with theft and everything to do with maintaining telco profits and government control over access to information.
If telcos can't outlaw sharing outright, they will make it unknowable whether connecting to an open hotspot will expose the user to prosecution, thus creating fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Governments are in the pockets of large economic interests like the telcos and in addition want to be sure that there is no opportunity to communicate without them listening in.
Slashdot Mirror
Forbidding fraternizing with a competitor is lousy but understandable. This crackhead company prohibits fraternizing with your own coworkers.
You don't really need to know the details of the law. If the law conflicts with what the judge wants to do, then so much the worse for the law. Don't count on appeals, either - you probably can't afford one or didn't have a court reporter at the trial and anyway, it's just asking another judge to express contempt for a colleague. The purpose of the maze of laws is not to direct what must be done, but to ensure that you will hire a lawyer to figure it out.
Here is a rough guide which is more accurate than the law at predicting who will win in courts:
1.Federal government
2.State Government
3.Banks
4.Multinational Corporations
5.High level VIPs
6.Local government
7.Other corporations
8.Mid-level VIPs
9.Pretty women
10.Women
11.Men
12.Lower-class people
The greater the difference in level, the more certain that the outcome will go to the higher rank.
If in a state court and only one of the parties is in-state, move the in-state party up 1 or 2 notches. You get about 1 notch for each 25% by which your legal bill exceeds the other party. You lose 1-2 notches for being clearly in the wrong. Other easily-spotted exceptional circumstances can move a party up or down the list, as well.
I agree for the most part, except that I think that the likelihood that the majority will figure it out is quite slim. The public education system has manufactured enough stupidity and inculcated enough belief in the powerlessness of individuals to ensure that that won't happen. The echo chamber of corporate media controls the terms of debate for both the masses and 95% of the nominal elites anyway.
;|
The practical ability to mount a revolt had already been managed out of existence sometime between 1910 and Roosevelt's second term. (H.L. Mencken is a good guide to the history of that process. Gatto's Underground History of American Education, especially chapters 9 and 15, also has a great deal of information about the methods of mass control.)
The Patriot Act - no, let's not give them that control over language - rather, the Police State Act is just a manifestation of the natural amoral imperative of all organizations to expand their dominion by any means available. Its purpose is to provide the State justification and cover for using the power they already had to crush whomever might get in their way. The jack-boots are not too worried about mass movements, since they have the ability to strangle most such movements in the crib. Those that might slip through will have their votes counted on these rigged machines, as you said. It's a belt-and-suspenders approach that shows every sign of being successful so far.
So, no, don't take off your tinfoil hat unless you think it might just be enhancing your radar signature.
Thanks for the answer. Patenting to prove that you have the right to make your own designs is even more paranoid than I am - and that's a compliment.
Truth is, we're already inside the event horizon for a totalitarian state - neither 1984 nor Brave New World but with roughly the governance of the former and the opinion control of the latter. I think the only way we can escape as a society is to jettison the mass of the administrators, ad-men and assorted ass-kissers downward at high velocity.
Yep. You're right. I was simply giving some quotes that more eloquently expressed the mood of the post to which I was reponding. However, the other response to your post is also correct - guerilla tactics have worked against big armies in the past. Getting the critical mass needed would be difficult these days, though. Anything less than a full takeover would just make the State stronger and more ruthless. On the other hand, with encryption, steganography and a modern cell-structure for limiting damage from infiltrators, securing communications and coordinating action would be easier than ever before. This is theoretical, though. We are a long way from running out of decent, nonviolent options.
/political-media-education complex as just another system to be hacked, and like-minded citizens can indeed retake control of the nation.
Guerilla tactics and organization can be even more effectively applied to non-military objectives. An excellent target would be gaining control of the the strategic state Republican and Democratic party organizations through covert but legal means. Then choose what choice of candidates will be offered, and use broad-based overt online organization to rock the primaries of both parties. With enough power in the state and Federal legislatures, the legacy of tortured legal opinions and case law can be swept away and the Constitution restored.
Another essential target would be to use laws (assuming that taking over the parties is as easy as I think) or perhaps more covert methods (and I'm not sure what those would be) to bring the large corporations and foundations to heel. Those organizations have effective control of the media, which in turn shape policy and public opinion.
In surprisingly short order it may be possible to undo much of the damage that has been done to the American mind and make this country freer than it ever was before.
Think of the military-industrial
However US workers lose the jobs that went overseas, the company that kept its production in the US goes out of business and all its workers lose their jobs, and if this happens enough, in the long run the US workers can't afford to buy widgets anymore, the offshoring company goes out of business and the foreign workers are out of their shitty jobs - but now their environment is poisoned, too. Of course the situation is more complicated than that- you will get economic instability, current account deficits, greater wealth inequalities within both countries, and other effects - but that's the gist of it.
In absolute numbers there are far more Asians who are sufficiently smart, skilled and knowledgeable for almost any given job than there are Americans. If the labor market were completely free, there would be no reason for Americans to earn more than those Asians. This is good news for the Asians and bad news for Americans. Similar arguments apply to the other countries in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Once you realize that free trade only works for us if we have something to trade, and we don't actually make much in the way of physical goods anymore, the economic necessity of geting the IP restrictions in the treaty becomes obvious. Neal Stephenson put it a lot better than I:
And pizza gets cold when delivered intercontinentally.
"Now working for myself, and have several patents in the mill."
How did you manage to afford the PTO and lawyer fees, if you don't mind me asking? I've wanted to patent some ideas for a long time but the cost always seemed prohibitive. Not to mention the fact that a patent is just a license to sue, so if you can't come up with some hundreds of thousands of dollars for litigation you just have to count on the kindness not just of strangers, but of corporations.
Good idea, but the key is committee votes - that's where all the action takes place, not on the floor.
Franklin was a printer in an era when copy restrictions in America were essentially nonexistent. Newspapers like the one he wrote for as a boy depended on copying from one another. He trained himself to write well by cutting up copies of Addison and Steele, rewording each line, casting them in verse and translating back to prose: rip-mix-burn 1700s-style. Franklin was in trouble with the law in Boston for saying things the powers that be did not approve of, so he was sensitive to government restrictions on the press. On the other hand, he was a bestselling author every year after he started publishing Poor Richard's Almanac, so he understood the advantages of copyright.
Franklin would care very much about copyright and would see it from more than one angle. He would be appalled at the abuses of prisoners as well, likely more so than IP law, but there is no doubt that he would consider the right to publish and to make fair use of published materials essential liberties.
You are dead-on. The people who really decide things have been Hegelians for a long time now, and one of the implications of applying that philosophy is the need to manage both the thesis and the antithesis if you want to control the synthesis. The more sturm und drang created in the fight between the two sides, the more certain the control. Everyone looks at the fight rather than elsewhere. Which side one picks doesn't really matter, and the undecideds have been trained to think that "the truth lies somewhere in the middle" on topics of controversy.
The people who set up the false choices are the only ones with real choices. This control is excercised by offering or threatening to pull advertising in the for-profit media, and using foundation dollars the same way for the non-profits.
Maybe so - but we got by in 1939 on $51E9 in today's money for the military. We have some more obligations now, but the War Department budget could realistically get down to $100-150E9 within five years if there were the political will to do so. That would erase the deficit and likely leave quite a bit left over. We'd have to pull out of a few dozen countries, maybe, but that's all to the good. The real dividend would come from freeing up a lot of engineers and other highly able people to work in industries which actually produce goods rather than ills.
I hope we eventually eliminate the standing army entirely, which would return to the original vision of this country shown in the Constitutional limitation of Army appropriations to two years. Unfortunately the oligopoly that owns and operates the country thinks America should be a world empire.
To avoid giving the impression that that is the official view of the Washington Times editorial board, the byline reads:
TODAY'S COLUMNIST
By Martin L. Fackler
July 29, 2005.
The bit I think you are referring to does not mean what you say it does:
In other words she had been outed, thus she was no longer clandestine. The interview continues:
He can't talk about specifics that touch on still-classified information. But he can say that the CIA believed a crime had been committed and let you draw your own conclusions.
Earlier in the article he repeated another statement by the CIA which makes it even more clear that Plame was an undercover CIA officer:
Just for fun here are some more quotes from the same interview demonstrating that it is ridiculous to believe that Wilson is a Democratic stooge or that Karl Rove was not trying to smear Plame:
Well, spoofing is illegal unless you are doing it for a legit reson. My wireless ISP uses MAC authentication only and is very difficult to reach to get a MAC change. When my card turned out to be junk, I replaced it with a Belkin and programmed the old MAC in. When I told the ISP about it later, the guy was quite surprised - he had no idea that was possible. They still have not upgraded their security or acess control method. :(
When I tried to find out from the local Apple store how to change the MAC so a visitor staying at my place could connect to the network, the arrogant child at the service and repair desk refused to believe it was possible on any card.
The New Scientist reports:
Michael E. Brown, a Caltech professor and one of the original observers of the planetwrites:
There is a link on the EFF page so you can send a canned or customized letter of support for this bill to your Senators and representative.
You forget that Lindh was fighting the heroin lordds of the Northern Alliance (who were our enemies at the time) when he was captured, and had joined the Taliban before the US went to war against them. Not to mention that the government had to drop nearly all charges against him due to lack of evidence, not lenience.
If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
The problem is that the realm of "Constitutionally protected" is growing smaller and smaller.
*Gag orders by courts, which often hide unjust or even illegal acts
*"National security" secrets that have nothing to do with anything other than covering up mistakes or even crimes.
*Regulations prohibiting mentioning certain words at airport security checkpoints. Saying "I don't have a bomb" will often get you detained and your checked luggage blown up.
*"Free speech areas" which are simply cages for dissidents
*Prohibitions on making legal arguments or even mentioning certain statutes in court - see the case of Peter McWilliams for an example. There are certain legal arguments which by themselves are punished by fines in Tax Court.
*Conspiracy statutes in which even discussing matters the government does not approve have been construed to be felonies.
*Obscenity and pornography laws - if someone under the age of 18 takes a provocative photograph of him/herself, he or she may be arrested for child porn and sent to an adult prison. Not to mention the prohibition on "indecent" speech or pictures on the public airwaves.
*IIRC, organizations which the AG disapproves of, even based solely on their rhetoric, may be declared "terrorist" and the citizenship of their members revoked.
*Laws against publishing technical information which could be used to create restricted-use weapons, or substances. (Drugs and explosives, mostly.)
*Decisions holding that the system of index numbers universally used to refer to court decisions and statutes is owned by a private company who can restrict its use. (Westlaw)
*The State can prohibit or punish any speech by students which it deems "disruptive", even though the students are compelled by law to attend. This is sometimes extended to cover speech off school grounds.
Those are just the big ones - here are a few other, lesser or older infringements:
*Prohibitions on privately funded birth-control and abortion information for clinics that receive any government money, no matter how little.
*Reaching further back, try reading up on Anthony Comstock's governmental crusade against anything that offended Victorian morality being sent through the mails. Or the alien and sedition acts.
*Infringements on the doctrine of fair use.
*Monitoring library computers and books checked out.
*Anti-flag burning laws which only apply to symbolic acts, not honorable disposal of worn-out flags.
*Soon, if the proposal goes through, differential taxation of speech and images which offend Congressmen. If that isn't struck down, expect expansions to other speech which is inconvenient for our current representatives.
*Limitations on publishing code which infringes on an earlier-filed but unpublished patent.
*Trademark dilution and infringement judgements against people using common words in the English language.
and on and on...
Read it again:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The executive (in this case the S.S.) is only there to carry out the laws passed by Congress. If there is no legitimate law they are enforcing, they are merely criminals. According to the 1st Amendment, Congress may make NO LAW in any way abridging the freedom to speak, peaceably assemble, or petition and that includes abridgements such as when and where the people choose to do so. How can anyone say that one is still being allowed their right to simultaneously assemble, speak and petition the President when they are not allowed within a mile of him?
"Which search is unreasonable?"
The search of your urine for drug metabolites. Also, I know that employers are not yet bound to respect all the rights of the Constitution, 14th Amendment or no, but in Georgia, for instance, one can be cut off from the unemployment benefits which one has already paid for if one refuses to take a pre-employment drug screen. Other laws make it clear that the piss tests are conducted with State connivance and thus are subject to the limitations of the Bill of Rights.
"where is that listed"
See the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution. It is a natural right not enumerated in the Constitution. For proof of its validity, assume the contrary of the primary right - that people has no right to think whatever they please. You can see where that leads, can't you? (If not, then I might as well be talking to the proverbial wall.) Since some thoughts and indeed ways of thinking are unavailable without drugs, and those thoughts and ways of thinking are within the natural rights of man, therefore the drugs needed to achieve those mental states are likewise protected. I am aware that the US courts disagree with me. Our difference of opinion is due to the fact that I am right and they are wrong.
"does not include infringing the rights of others"
Taking drugs such as marijuana, morphine, or MDMA does not infringe the rights of others any more than meditating or eating chocolate.
"Who's restricting your right to control your bodily fluids?"
The employers in the US with encouragement and sometimes requirement of the US and state governments.
"You have no right not to be discrriminated [sic] against." Obviously false, and in any event unresponsive to what I wrote. The outcome of the drug test has no bearing on an applicant's ability to do the job. Off-the-job use of the Valium, the drug most commonly flagged in piss tests, may even improve abilities on the job. Try again.
"You have no right to dignity" Bullshit. You have the right to maintain the dignity which all human beings are presumed to have; you have the right not to be forced to accept humiliation in order to secure the basic necessities of life.
*
I will endeavor to ignore further trolling from lp-habu.
How about the right to be secure against unreasonable searches? The right to regulate one's own mental state by any means, (which is a collary of the right to think however one pleases)? The right to control one's own bodily fluids? The right not to be discriminated against on the basis of unreliable tests for activities that are unproven to correspond with ability to do the job? The right to human dignity?
I can't believe what bootlicking lackeys Americans have become. Free country - my ass! If a prospective employer wants you to give a urine sample, oblige them - but throw it in that loathsome petty tyrant's face!
The original creator has the right to choose whether or not to publish or disclose his or her ideas. Once he or she has conveyed the work to others, however, the force needed to prevent others from doing he same is a privilege, not a right.
Society acting in its own interest will limit those privileges to the minimum required to encourage creation and publication. Any excess privilege is state-enforced theft from every individual who is forced to pay for what is the natural property and heritage of humankind.
I don't know which is more disturbing - the fact that this man and the one in Florida have been prosecuted, or the way that so many cowardly Slashdotters are unwilling to stick up for the rights of computer users. These prosecutions have nothing to do with theft and everything to do with maintaining telco profits and government control over access to information.
If telcos can't outlaw sharing outright, they will make it unknowable whether connecting to an open hotspot will expose the user to prosecution, thus creating fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Governments are in the pockets of large economic interests like the telcos and in addition want to be sure that there is no opportunity to communicate without them listening in.