Meanwhile there are some new really interesting concepts in the ebook world, like free online reading coupled with new approaches to low-overhead publishing. See for example Libertary, www.libertary.com, some more varied and interesting books and less hype. Libertary's developing a low-overhead publishing model that uses free online reading to generate interest in books as well as a bit more highly featured free reading model. Or, if you have good Chinese, check out www.read-novel.com, probably the largest book site in the world. Or of course there's always Safari. And Boing Boing opened their own book site today. So there actually is some really interesting stuff going on in the free books field.
Hopefully the judge will do the sensible thing, which is to give Internet Archive or whoever else wants the right to publish orphans and pay royalties for it, the right to do so.
The Fiction Circus blog posting is truly silly. The Author's Guild was not set up by Google, that's for sure. Google just wanted to index all the books and provide links to where you could buy them. The Author's Guild (a long standing and very backward looking organization) sued, claiming that indexing was a violation of copyright. In other words, it was an effort to prevent Google from making their books more accessible on the web. Now you have people like this Fiction Circus clown saying, Google should be able to sell orphan books in electronic form, because others aren't alos doing it. So, we're better off with no one republishing orphan works. Great logic! That is, if you're against people having access to books.
I haven't heard that Google opposes anyone else doing this. But, you have to have a committed, well run organization to pull it off. Microsoft, for example, gave a try at offering a book search service, but gave up after scanning a few libraries, it was too hard and not enough short-term profit, apparently. Now we find "libertarians" saying, Google shouldn't do it either, because, well, nobody else is doing it, and, let's keep it that way!
I like the battlefield metaphor. Isn't it great to live in a country where some dumb woman gets fined $200,000 for downloading a few songs and lying about it, and our government can "rendition" an innocent man and send him to Syria to be tortured and our Supreme Court says he can't sue for even one penny because we have state secrets (i.e., stuff that our government does we can't know about), and a private soldier contracting with our government can get drunk and shoot dead the bodyguard of the VP if Iraq, and hasn't even faced charges 9 months later, and.... oh well. Glad to see we still have citizens on our juries who will stand up for the law, even if it means standing up to someone weak and powerless!
I don't see any mention of Swap CD, a service that allows you to trade CDs for a minimal charge (like, 50 cents a cd). You put up a list of the ones you're willing to trade and when someone picks one, you have to pay shipping (about $!) They have an excellent routine for printing out an "envelope" with address pre-printed you can wrap the CD in. Total cost for each CD is about $1.50, including the cost of shipping yours out and the fee for selecting another's CD. Lots of the CDs come with the inserts so you can get album art. This is another way of using Web technology to distribute music that's kind of fun and gets you cheap music, but the selection is of course catch-as -catch can, though I've gotten some really interesting stuff.
Remember, this is an administration that has repeatedly rejected scientific findings and edited scientific reports to spin things favorably for favored big business interests. The previous surgeon general reports that the White House refused to allow him to publish material if it didn't repeatedly refer to President Bush favorably. Limiting communications about our government's work on highway safety to a political appointee lawyer is going to limit the ability of engineers to discuss matters of extreme public importance -- the safety of our nation's transportation infrastructure. (BTW, the head of the agency put out some canard right after the Minnesota bridge collapse to try to divert attention away from the serious issues of whether our government has skimped on funding for maintenance and safety, and this rule would prevent anyone from providing any other view.)
Hey, this bill was introduced by an anti-labor, pro-war Republican, with zero co-sponsors. Yes, the RIAA might dream of using educational funds to prevent sharing of information, but what with even major music companies bailing out from RIAA, I don't think they can strong-arm anything through. What with guys like the sponsor of this stupid bill in the minority, it really is worth slashdotters who obviously feel strongly about this to take a few minutes to let the members of the committee know how you feel.
Flash back 20 years or so, and imagine Bill Gates talking about the role of lawyers in the tech biz. Probably, you'd need earplugs. Lawsuits? Regulation? Antitrust? You imagine the invective. Now, the tune is different. It's, Lawyers are a Firm's Best Friend! (Apologies to Marilyn Monroe) This is one more symptom that MS, which has created negative value for its shareholders this century, is really on the ropes financially. With their monopolies, they just don't have any feasible business direction that could make enough money to make their stock a good investment. So, they have switched tactics -- threaten to sue competing operating systems, occupy as much of the web as they can, make deals with Viacom and similar bullies to do anything possible to prevent communication that doesn't make a profit for MS and its buddies. The increasingly aggressive legal maneuvering by MS is a strong sign that the tech side of the company has no chance whatsoever of supporting the stock price, so the once-techie company becomes more and more of a legal bully. Oh Bill, remember when?
Most interesting thing about this feeble attack is to show how weak Microsoft is as a technology company. Flagship product Vista opens to very bad reviews. Cash cow Office's latest version isn't setting the market on fire, and faces very functional, free competition. Microsoft can't come up with a search offering that really competes with Google in the market. So, desperate, the former technology company turns to -- a legalistic attack on the competition. And, not a particularly profound or well-thought out attack, either, as the postings in this thread demonstrate. Anyone who doubted Microsoft is on the downward curve should take note. The markets, of course, appear to have known this for quite some time -- if you invested in Microsoft in 2000, or even 2004, you passed up the real opportunities.
Our legal system, of course, is capable of very serious blunders, such as, refusing to break Microsoft up despite its anticompetitive and monopolistic practices. Investors in Microsoft stock would be much happier today if the courts had applied the law with full force. But, the law is, well, imperfect. So, maybe Microsoft and the publishers version of the RIAA will win the case, and not only help preserve the software monopoly, but also limit the ability of readers to find and read books. Yes if this happens the law would be an ass. Need I say more?
The policy may specify a number of allowable incorrect answers, either in total or during a period of time, for example, 3 incorrect answers per day or 30 incorrect answers per month. When the allowable number of incorrect answers has been exceeded, several response are possible, from noting a user's record but taking no action, to a follow up communication with the user, to disabling or even repossessing the computer 110. The policy may be directed to a single computer and thereby a single user or subscriber. Alternately, the policy may extend to a group of computers and correspondingly to a common owner, for example, a business or school. When the limit of incorrect responses is reached as an aggregate of group of computers, a sanction may be imposed or a higher level of monitoring may be initiated.
Seems like this relates to compulsory viewing of ads, with the distinct possibility of "sanctions" for those who don't comply.
With your point about only the weak minded being affected by advertising, I agree with you that the ubermensch can resist. But you must recognize that various businesses, governments, and other organizations actually spend billions of dollars every day to affect economic/political/organizational/social behavior via adverstisements. If ads weren't effective, I don't think this would continue indefinitely. Some kinds of advertisers would leap at the ability to compel users to view their ads. Under the proposal Microsoft has patented, the district can be asked to pound the brand name into the kids' heads, or lose functionality of their "free" computer system. It's a clear advance on the "free" TV news for schools that made such a flap a few years back.
I do so agree! The patent isn't limited to schools. The compelled viewing of ads could be done in the school, in the workplace, in the library, and yes, if you design the right equipment, in the home. And, besides, it's not limited to ads for things, either is it? What about political ads both in the narrower sense of ads for candidates and in the larger sense of ads that tell you how to think. And, what about the negative. You could make some kinds of viewing off limits, and then provide the user some samples, and if they did look at the forbidden words, then you could disable or take away their computer. Do the people who are posting in this thread have not vision of the whole variety of techniques for enforcing viewer behavior that this technology implies?
The investigation showed, base salary averaging $71,000. Let's see, there's also health insurance, social security, worker's comp, unemployment insurance, etc. etc. Normally one would add on another 30% or so to cover benefits. So, salary plus benefits would come to $93K give or take. Bonus of 8%? Puts you up to $100 K. So, much as I hate to weigh in on Mr. Gates' side, on this one, the criticism is very unfair.
Let's not dilute the legitimate critique of the Redmond Hegemon -- ultra-DRM in Vista, jacking up cost of OS for not benefit worth the cost, etc. etc. Hey, Bill, what's your response to Steve Job's brilliant piece on DRM?
But, for the H1-B visas, the choice is, pay high-skilled valuable people more in the US, or pay them less in India Philippines China Pakistan Egypt etc etc etc. As I approach retirement, and do the calculations on the social security system, I say, open the gates to even low paid $50 K workers, instead of paying them $10K somewhere else!
Hey, I think I own some of the design elements of my house. I don't see how they have the right to sell images of this without paying me a royalty. So, what about writing any of these services a short note letting them know that I don't consent to them using images of my house for their for-profit business. Well, actually, on second thought, I might consent if they're willing to pay me a royalty I consider sufficient. Okay, a man's home ain't his castle any more, but a man's design must still be copyrighted if Micky Mouse is!
Another horrifying case is that of Julian Green, who was wrongly accused after a trojan left child porn pictures on his computer -- he did get off due to some good forensic work, but only after spending 9 months in jail. Green a single father, almost lost custody of his daughter. The police just didn't entertain the idea that his computer had been hijacked as a child porn transfer point, but it can happen. A good reason for using a strong anti-spyware program...
I totally agree with your main point, no paper constitution is going to guarantee rights for a people not willing to stand up for them. But I would be a little cautious about putting too much faith in whatever we're calling the "people." "We the People" sometimes aren't exactly careful in protecting the rights of minorities -- after all, it was a majority white population that enslaved Blacks (and after the civil war subjected blacks to a "jim crow" apartheid system) and killed lots and lots of Indians, and then there was the Japenese internment, and coolie labor, and, well the list could go on pretty long. And also, if you look back on the 20th century, tyranny and genocide were pretty much every time perpetrated in the name of the "people" by "people's republics" or the Nazi variant of the "volk" Without some laws that protect the individual against the people, things can get pretty ugly.
There's no provision in the Constitution or bill of rights expressly guaranteeing the right to travel. The judicial source of this right is in some 19th century cases where the courts interpreted the 'privileges and immunities' clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the first supreme court case saying that segregation was permitted under the Fourteenth Amendment, ironically called the "Civil Rights Cases". It's a really disgusting decision. The Court said that having segregated train cars did not violate the equal protection clause, because everyone got a train car, just segregated by race (and alot fewer cars for Blacks, of course, not to mention, the seats weren't hardly as nice.) Then the "civil rights" decision says, does this violate any of the privileges or immunities of the black citizens? The court made a list of what these privileges and immunities are, and included the right to travel! This is the source of courts saying the right to travel is a constitutional right. So, historically speaking at least, the right to travel is kind of a limited right, with a pretty questionable origin. (Kind of like more modern "activist" judges putting in the right to privacy or abortion as "privileges and immunities" or "due process" rights, but with a twist -- the judges also decided to eviscerate the equal protection clause at the same time.)
So, the posts in this thread that say, courts might rule it constitutional to say you can travel, but just not by airplane (or train or car or bus) seem a little less far fetched. But hey, that was what it meant to Black people back in 1880. What was it called in my childhood? Second class citizenship? Also, please bear in mind in this election season, if we keep electing people who say it's not unamerican to torture, or redefine torture as "harsh treatment" of prisoners, please do not expect them to respect other fundamental rights.
Gee, I thought all that penis enlargment and breast improvement spam was aimed at people with inferiorty complexes, but now I learn it's really foreshadowing the next evolutionary phase of mankind. Hmm, and lighter skin is the direction of evolution? Not the first time the label of "evolutionary science" has been used for racist drivel. Mr. Curry's article does demonstrate that getting a PHD certainly is not guarantee of intellignece.
Mr. Curry seems to have read too many Playboys and watched to many grade-b Hollywood films. For a much more interesting vision of the future, try the robot stories by Stanislaw Lem. I've heard leading robotics scholars say we might get to the singularity (when robots are more intelligent than people) as soon as 20 or 30 years from now (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity), at which point the size of one's penis or the perkiness of one's breasts or the lightness of one's skin are surely going to be the least of our worries. That is, in the increasingly unlikely event that we're still around in a hundred years, having evolved to survive global warming and whatever other environmental disasters we might cook up by then!
China is our enemy? China is our friend? It depends on who you're talking about and who you ask. China isn't a monolith, although they're pretty centralized. (Like us -- today, DC politicos review even mid-level hires throughout the country.) There are friends of US even in their government, and enemies and in between, much like our government. I'm sure they try to spy on us and we try to spy on them. Remember early 2001, the tension after the crash of the US spy plane in Chinese airspace? There were reports of administration hawks saying we'll go after the countries later deemed Axis of Evil and then Red China as well. Today, we import something like twice as much from China, sell them the IBM laptop business, and our government occasionally bemoans lack of Chinese civil rights but caters to them to help us with N. Korea and other hotspots. This is reality in a world where we're married economically to them (ok, a pretty disfunctional marriage) and our efforts to project US power haven't worked out quite as expected (by us). (BTW, is the unnamed "security consultant" mentioned in the Register report really reliable as a news source?)
There's an article on this in the latest issue of the New Scientist -- if we want to bankrupt ourselves, we might consider putting a windmill in everyone's yard, so we can each maintain our own. Most houses aren't in the windiest locations such as the ocean or mountain ridges, so output wouldn't be g You might not like the noise. Turbulance caused by nearby structures disrupts windmills so you'd have to make it about 50 or 100 feet tall to get good energy output. Unless you live somewhere that's got alot of hot air blowing around, most of the energy would come when you didn't need it. Then again, if we all read our postings out loud, perhaps that would generate enough hot air!
Hmmm. Sounds kind of like the Florida election in 2000, when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the counting. Actually, in Washington, they counted the number of times required by law, then we had a big lawsuit which the losing Republican brought. He tried to prove fraud, and lost the lawsuit, too. Foul play, cried the Republicans, who had cried sour grapes at the Dems about Florida. At least, in Washington, the court didn't stop the counting!
What the WA election really brings up is, the question, when is an election a tie? As in Florida 2000, and several other counts I can remember, the margin of victory was less than the expected error of counting as I see it. For example, if you have 3 million votes, and the difference between the candidates' votes is less than 100, to give a striking example, really, it's a tie. We can't count accurately enough to have a meaningful difference. Given the variety of polling places, ambiguities of votes, etc. etc., the margin of error is just too great, even if you don't consider potential fraud or other manipulation of the vote. I think we should declare such an election to be a tie, and do whatever is done by law when we have a tie. I for one can't see how it's fair to count down to the razor margin where anyone who thinks about it realizes the error is greater than the vote-difference. (Aside: On the federal level, I don't know what would be done given our screwy electoral vote system. Any sensible system would divide the electoral vote from the state proportionally to the popular vote, but we insist on winner-take-all, meaning that in a national election, a state like Wisconsin might get more campaign attention than California, because of a closer division of the vote. This is unfair. (To Wisconsin, because they probably would get about 10,000 political ads a day on radio, TV, and those horrible auto-calls with recorded messages.))
The way electronic voting is now set up there is really no way to audit or check the results of what's recorded against what the voter actually entered. because no independent record is kept of what the voter entered. So, no one can say one way or the other conclusively whether or not the votes were recorded accurately. I had a personal encounter with a fellow from one of the auditing companies who claimed to have set up a vote audit procedure for one of the states. He said, they did a black box audit, by setting up dummy voting machines, running votes through them, and seeing if the count was accurate. Of course, it was. His position was that this conclusively showed the machines were accurate. I very strongly disagree. Without any audit at all of the real-time voting process, not even spot-checking, there is no way anyone can validate these systems in operation. The problems found by the Princeton team (see other comments) are only examples. One simply cannot trust any system to be accurate without auditing it in my view. Computer systems have all kinds of design and input-output issues that require monitoring, testing, and controls. Would you put your money in a bank that was never audited (well, I hope not much!) You're putting your votes in a system that's not audited, so don't expect the counts to be accurate.
This is especially disturbing when the CEO of the machine that makes the most voting machines (Wally Odell, CEO of Diebold) stated during the last election, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." It has widely been reported that Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel has an interest in another voting machine company. (Hagel did not disclose this until it was reported by others. See http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) In this context, reliable auditing of the systems seems all the more important to me.
I do not understand why there is not a strong consensus behind a program for at least doing an audit that would confirm the accuracy of these systems in real time.
Have you tried the Google service? They scan the books, but don't deliver copyrighted material on demand. Instead, you get to read a page or two, then Google directs you to the publisher to get a copy. How can this violate the rights of publishers or authors? If I go to a bookstore, I can browse the book, and if I go to a library, I can check out a copy. I get less than that from Google Library -- all it does is make the information searchable so I can find books I'm interested in. This benefits at least 99.9% of the world unless I'm missing something.
Is it any more dictatorial for Google to do this than for a library to buy a book and put it into circulation?
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile there are some new really interesting concepts in the ebook world, like free online reading coupled with new approaches to low-overhead publishing. See for example Libertary, www.libertary.com, some more varied and interesting books and less hype. Libertary's developing a low-overhead publishing model that uses free online reading to generate interest in books as well as a bit more highly featured free reading model. Or, if you have good Chinese, check out www.read-novel.com, probably the largest book site in the world. Or of course there's always Safari. And Boing Boing opened their own book site today. So there actually is some really interesting stuff going on in the free books field.
Hopefully the judge will do the sensible thing, which is to give Internet Archive or whoever else wants the right to publish orphans and pay royalties for it, the right to do so. The Fiction Circus blog posting is truly silly. The Author's Guild was not set up by Google, that's for sure. Google just wanted to index all the books and provide links to where you could buy them. The Author's Guild (a long standing and very backward looking organization) sued, claiming that indexing was a violation of copyright. In other words, it was an effort to prevent Google from making their books more accessible on the web. Now you have people like this Fiction Circus clown saying, Google should be able to sell orphan books in electronic form, because others aren't alos doing it. So, we're better off with no one republishing orphan works. Great logic! That is, if you're against people having access to books. I haven't heard that Google opposes anyone else doing this. But, you have to have a committed, well run organization to pull it off. Microsoft, for example, gave a try at offering a book search service, but gave up after scanning a few libraries, it was too hard and not enough short-term profit, apparently. Now we find "libertarians" saying, Google shouldn't do it either, because, well, nobody else is doing it, and, let's keep it that way!
I like the battlefield metaphor. Isn't it great to live in a country where some dumb woman gets fined $200,000 for downloading a few songs and lying about it, and our government can "rendition" an innocent man and send him to Syria to be tortured and our Supreme Court says he can't sue for even one penny because we have state secrets (i.e., stuff that our government does we can't know about), and a private soldier contracting with our government can get drunk and shoot dead the bodyguard of the VP if Iraq, and hasn't even faced charges 9 months later, and .... oh well. Glad to see we still have citizens on our juries who will stand up for the law, even if it means standing up to someone weak and powerless!
I don't see any mention of Swap CD, a service that allows you to trade CDs for a minimal charge (like, 50 cents a cd). You put up a list of the ones you're willing to trade and when someone picks one, you have to pay shipping (about $!) They have an excellent routine for printing out an "envelope" with address pre-printed you can wrap the CD in. Total cost for each CD is about $1.50, including the cost of shipping yours out and the fee for selecting another's CD. Lots of the CDs come with the inserts so you can get album art. This is another way of using Web technology to distribute music that's kind of fun and gets you cheap music, but the selection is of course catch-as -catch can, though I've gotten some really interesting stuff.
Remember, this is an administration that has repeatedly rejected scientific findings and edited scientific reports to spin things favorably for favored big business interests. The previous surgeon general reports that the White House refused to allow him to publish material if it didn't repeatedly refer to President Bush favorably. Limiting communications about our government's work on highway safety to a political appointee lawyer is going to limit the ability of engineers to discuss matters of extreme public importance -- the safety of our nation's transportation infrastructure. (BTW, the head of the agency put out some canard right after the Minnesota bridge collapse to try to divert attention away from the serious issues of whether our government has skimped on funding for maintenance and safety, and this rule would prevent anyone from providing any other view.)
Hey, this bill was introduced by an anti-labor, pro-war Republican, with zero co-sponsors. Yes, the RIAA might dream of using educational funds to prevent sharing of information, but what with even major music companies bailing out from RIAA, I don't think they can strong-arm anything through. What with guys like the sponsor of this stupid bill in the minority, it really is worth slashdotters who obviously feel strongly about this to take a few minutes to let the members of the committee know how you feel.
Flash back 20 years or so, and imagine Bill Gates talking about the role of lawyers in the tech biz. Probably, you'd need earplugs. Lawsuits? Regulation? Antitrust? You imagine the invective. Now, the tune is different. It's, Lawyers are a Firm's Best Friend! (Apologies to Marilyn Monroe) This is one more symptom that MS, which has created negative value for its shareholders this century, is really on the ropes financially. With their monopolies, they just don't have any feasible business direction that could make enough money to make their stock a good investment. So, they have switched tactics -- threaten to sue competing operating systems, occupy as much of the web as they can, make deals with Viacom and similar bullies to do anything possible to prevent communication that doesn't make a profit for MS and its buddies. The increasingly aggressive legal maneuvering by MS is a strong sign that the tech side of the company has no chance whatsoever of supporting the stock price, so the once-techie company becomes more and more of a legal bully. Oh Bill, remember when?
Our legal system, of course, is capable of very serious blunders, such as, refusing to break Microsoft up despite its anticompetitive and monopolistic practices. Investors in Microsoft stock would be much happier today if the courts had applied the law with full force. But, the law is, well, imperfect. So, maybe Microsoft and the publishers version of the RIAA will win the case, and not only help preserve the software monopoly, but also limit the ability of readers to find and read books. Yes if this happens the law would be an ass. Need I say more?
I do so agree! The patent isn't limited to schools. The compelled viewing of ads could be done in the school, in the workplace, in the library, and yes, if you design the right equipment, in the home. And, besides, it's not limited to ads for things, either is it? What about political ads both in the narrower sense of ads for candidates and in the larger sense of ads that tell you how to think. And, what about the negative. You could make some kinds of viewing off limits, and then provide the user some samples, and if they did look at the forbidden words, then you could disable or take away their computer. Do the people who are posting in this thread have not vision of the whole variety of techniques for enforcing viewer behavior that this technology implies?
The investigation showed, base salary averaging $71,000. Let's see, there's also health insurance, social security, worker's comp, unemployment insurance, etc. etc. Normally one would add on another 30% or so to cover benefits. So, salary plus benefits would come to $93K give or take. Bonus of 8%? Puts you up to $100 K. So, much as I hate to weigh in on Mr. Gates' side, on this one, the criticism is very unfair. Let's not dilute the legitimate critique of the Redmond Hegemon -- ultra-DRM in Vista, jacking up cost of OS for not benefit worth the cost, etc. etc. Hey, Bill, what's your response to Steve Job's brilliant piece on DRM? But, for the H1-B visas, the choice is, pay high-skilled valuable people more in the US, or pay them less in India Philippines China Pakistan Egypt etc etc etc. As I approach retirement, and do the calculations on the social security system, I say, open the gates to even low paid $50 K workers, instead of paying them $10K somewhere else!
Hey, I think I own some of the design elements of my house. I don't see how they have the right to sell images of this without paying me a royalty. So, what about writing any of these services a short note letting them know that I don't consent to them using images of my house for their for-profit business. Well, actually, on second thought, I might consent if they're willing to pay me a royalty I consider sufficient. Okay, a man's home ain't his castle any more, but a man's design must still be copyrighted if Micky Mouse is!
Another horrifying case is that of Julian Green, who was wrongly accused after a trojan left child porn pictures on his computer -- he did get off due to some good forensic work, but only after spending 9 months in jail. Green a single father, almost lost custody of his daughter. The police just didn't entertain the idea that his computer had been hijacked as a child porn transfer point, but it can happen. A good reason for using a strong anti-spyware program...
Cagri? Never heard of him. It's Arnold Schwarzenegger who has the beef against Borat for my two cents.
I totally agree with your main point, no paper constitution is going to guarantee rights for a people not willing to stand up for them. But I would be a little cautious about putting too much faith in whatever we're calling the "people." "We the People" sometimes aren't exactly careful in protecting the rights of minorities -- after all, it was a majority white population that enslaved Blacks (and after the civil war subjected blacks to a "jim crow" apartheid system) and killed lots and lots of Indians, and then there was the Japenese internment, and coolie labor, and, well the list could go on pretty long. And also, if you look back on the 20th century, tyranny and genocide were pretty much every time perpetrated in the name of the "people" by "people's republics" or the Nazi variant of the "volk" Without some laws that protect the individual against the people, things can get pretty ugly.
There's no provision in the Constitution or bill of rights expressly guaranteeing the right to travel. The judicial source of this right is in some 19th century cases where the courts interpreted the 'privileges and immunities' clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the first supreme court case saying that segregation was permitted under the Fourteenth Amendment, ironically called the "Civil Rights Cases". It's a really disgusting decision. The Court said that having segregated train cars did not violate the equal protection clause, because everyone got a train car, just segregated by race (and alot fewer cars for Blacks, of course, not to mention, the seats weren't hardly as nice.) Then the "civil rights" decision says, does this violate any of the privileges or immunities of the black citizens? The court made a list of what these privileges and immunities are, and included the right to travel! This is the source of courts saying the right to travel is a constitutional right. So, historically speaking at least, the right to travel is kind of a limited right, with a pretty questionable origin. (Kind of like more modern "activist" judges putting in the right to privacy or abortion as "privileges and immunities" or "due process" rights, but with a twist -- the judges also decided to eviscerate the equal protection clause at the same time.) So, the posts in this thread that say, courts might rule it constitutional to say you can travel, but just not by airplane (or train or car or bus) seem a little less far fetched. But hey, that was what it meant to Black people back in 1880. What was it called in my childhood? Second class citizenship? Also, please bear in mind in this election season, if we keep electing people who say it's not unamerican to torture, or redefine torture as "harsh treatment" of prisoners, please do not expect them to respect other fundamental rights.
Gee, I thought all that penis enlargment and breast improvement spam was aimed at people with inferiorty complexes, but now I learn it's really foreshadowing the next evolutionary phase of mankind. Hmm, and lighter skin is the direction of evolution? Not the first time the label of "evolutionary science" has been used for racist drivel. Mr. Curry's article does demonstrate that getting a PHD certainly is not guarantee of intellignece. Mr. Curry seems to have read too many Playboys and watched to many grade-b Hollywood films. For a much more interesting vision of the future, try the robot stories by Stanislaw Lem. I've heard leading robotics scholars say we might get to the singularity (when robots are more intelligent than people) as soon as 20 or 30 years from now (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity), at which point the size of one's penis or the perkiness of one's breasts or the lightness of one's skin are surely going to be the least of our worries. That is, in the increasingly unlikely event that we're still around in a hundred years, having evolved to survive global warming and whatever other environmental disasters we might cook up by then!
China is our enemy? China is our friend? It depends on who you're talking about and who you ask. China isn't a monolith, although they're pretty centralized. (Like us -- today, DC politicos review even mid-level hires throughout the country.) There are friends of US even in their government, and enemies and in between, much like our government. I'm sure they try to spy on us and we try to spy on them. Remember early 2001, the tension after the crash of the US spy plane in Chinese airspace? There were reports of administration hawks saying we'll go after the countries later deemed Axis of Evil and then Red China as well. Today, we import something like twice as much from China, sell them the IBM laptop business, and our government occasionally bemoans lack of Chinese civil rights but caters to them to help us with N. Korea and other hotspots. This is reality in a world where we're married economically to them (ok, a pretty disfunctional marriage) and our efforts to project US power haven't worked out quite as expected (by us). (BTW, is the unnamed "security consultant" mentioned in the Register report really reliable as a news source?)
There's an article on this in the latest issue of the New Scientist -- if we want to bankrupt ourselves, we might consider putting a windmill in everyone's yard, so we can each maintain our own. Most houses aren't in the windiest locations such as the ocean or mountain ridges, so output wouldn't be g You might not like the noise. Turbulance caused by nearby structures disrupts windmills so you'd have to make it about 50 or 100 feet tall to get good energy output. Unless you live somewhere that's got alot of hot air blowing around, most of the energy would come when you didn't need it. Then again, if we all read our postings out loud, perhaps that would generate enough hot air!
Hmmm. Sounds kind of like the Florida election in 2000, when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the counting. Actually, in Washington, they counted the number of times required by law, then we had a big lawsuit which the losing Republican brought. He tried to prove fraud, and lost the lawsuit, too. Foul play, cried the Republicans, who had cried sour grapes at the Dems about Florida. At least, in Washington, the court didn't stop the counting! What the WA election really brings up is, the question, when is an election a tie? As in Florida 2000, and several other counts I can remember, the margin of victory was less than the expected error of counting as I see it. For example, if you have 3 million votes, and the difference between the candidates' votes is less than 100, to give a striking example, really, it's a tie. We can't count accurately enough to have a meaningful difference. Given the variety of polling places, ambiguities of votes, etc. etc., the margin of error is just too great, even if you don't consider potential fraud or other manipulation of the vote. I think we should declare such an election to be a tie, and do whatever is done by law when we have a tie. I for one can't see how it's fair to count down to the razor margin where anyone who thinks about it realizes the error is greater than the vote-difference. (Aside: On the federal level, I don't know what would be done given our screwy electoral vote system. Any sensible system would divide the electoral vote from the state proportionally to the popular vote, but we insist on winner-take-all, meaning that in a national election, a state like Wisconsin might get more campaign attention than California, because of a closer division of the vote. This is unfair. (To Wisconsin, because they probably would get about 10,000 political ads a day on radio, TV, and those horrible auto-calls with recorded messages.))
The way electronic voting is now set up there is really no way to audit or check the results of what's recorded against what the voter actually entered. because no independent record is kept of what the voter entered. So, no one can say one way or the other conclusively whether or not the votes were recorded accurately. I had a personal encounter with a fellow from one of the auditing companies who claimed to have set up a vote audit procedure for one of the states. He said, they did a black box audit, by setting up dummy voting machines, running votes through them, and seeing if the count was accurate. Of course, it was. His position was that this conclusively showed the machines were accurate. I very strongly disagree. Without any audit at all of the real-time voting process, not even spot-checking, there is no way anyone can validate these systems in operation. The problems found by the Princeton team (see other comments) are only examples. One simply cannot trust any system to be accurate without auditing it in my view. Computer systems have all kinds of design and input-output issues that require monitoring, testing, and controls. Would you put your money in a bank that was never audited (well, I hope not much!) You're putting your votes in a system that's not audited, so don't expect the counts to be accurate. This is especially disturbing when the CEO of the machine that makes the most voting machines (Wally Odell, CEO of Diebold) stated during the last election, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." It has widely been reported that Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel has an interest in another voting machine company. (Hagel did not disclose this until it was reported by others. See http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) In this context, reliable auditing of the systems seems all the more important to me. I do not understand why there is not a strong consensus behind a program for at least doing an audit that would confirm the accuracy of these systems in real time.
Have you tried the Google service? They scan the books, but don't deliver copyrighted material on demand. Instead, you get to read a page or two, then Google directs you to the publisher to get a copy. How can this violate the rights of publishers or authors? If I go to a bookstore, I can browse the book, and if I go to a library, I can check out a copy. I get less than that from Google Library -- all it does is make the information searchable so I can find books I'm interested in. This benefits at least 99.9% of the world unless I'm missing something. Is it any more dictatorial for Google to do this than for a library to buy a book and put it into circulation?