In usa, you are told you have freedom, but practicing them requires money. You are only free as much as you have money.
What you failed to mention is that it is actually reasonably within the reach of most Americans because the media they need for speech is available in ways it isn't in China or Venezuela. There are thousands of companies that will sell you print supplies without fear that they'll face "reeducation through labor" for selling to you. There are dozens of video sharing sites. $200 buys you a Flip or something similar for making your own basic videos.
So, hopefully others will understand when I say "fuck you, you sniveling leftist brat."
They don't do any good anymore. Little inventors cannot even hope to sue a company like Intellectual Ventures unless they can find a lawyer willing--and able--to last years of litigation against the kind of legal resources such a company can focus on them. God help the poor SoB if IV retaliates by claiming infringement on half a dozen of its patents in the process of creating your own patent.
The reason people still support them is "fairness." It's not "fair" that people have great ideas but someone else monetizes them in a better way. Then someone says "they worked so hard and then someone stole the idea." All the hard work (misdirected or that produces nothing of value) in the world and a $1.50 still won't buy you a latte at Starbucks. As it shouldn't!
And ironically, all this system creates is one that is often unjust. Some poor guy who thinks he may become the next Bill Gates will probably have IV nuke him from orbit with a patent lawsuit right as he gets big enough that he's worth having Guido and Vinny, J.D. show up at his office with an offer he can't refuse ("hey, great idea you got going, it would be a shame if anything happened to it...")
Do a Google search. A decent looking search result shows up on the first page for "Obama Twitter connections."
Unless you are citing a specific study, in this day and age of good search engines, demanding "citations" for general topics is a form of trolling. It says "I'm too fucky lazy to do a 5 sec Google search."
Twitter, like Google, has been close to Obama. Wikileaks is making the Obama Administration (especially Hillary Clinton) look really bad both through the release of what was in those cables and their inability to "deal with" Wikileaks.
This is only slightly less retarded than asking why the mainstream media tends to run interference for Democrats, spinning everything they do in a positive light even if it's something that would have a Republican hanging from a cross on capitol hill.
Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if this were really implemented in a major way, it would create the ideal system for a terrorist group to discretely deliver several hundred bombs simultaneously all cross a major city.
No, a hundred thousand people killed by a country with no right to even be in their hemisphere is a million times worse than the loss of economic productivity.
Hey asshole, go back and reread what I actually wrote.
You see to think it's "oh noes, Johnny won't be able to buy the latest XBox 360 game."
What I wrote was that "Johnny, his family and much of his community will literally have the economy collapse around them."
Like most people, you seem to have no clue how badly the banks have screwed up. Well, let me clue you in...
1) They've literally destroyed the majority of the West's saved capital.
2) They've nearly destroyed the enforceability of the land title laws in at least the United States which means private home ownership, heck even eminent domain, is legally precarious since the system can longer resolve who owns what.
3) They've destroyed most of the capital that backs both private employers and governments alike.
You know what that means, sparky? It means that they've got a spasming finger resting on the reset button of our economies and political systems.
When that reset button finally gets hit, it means there won't be an efficient supply chain to get you munchies to eat while you get pissy on Slashdot. It means that if you live in an area that depends on a regular food shipments, there won't be anything to trade with and keep the shipments going.
It means most of the West will be looking at the worst depression it's ever seen. The sort of thing that used to exist only in the realm of academic theory and horror movies.
The majority of the classified information they've dump has been the sort of shit that the federal government produces in reams and forgets about. It's not "whistle-blower grade" materials like the Pentagon Papers. All it's likely to do is make the politicians more paranoid and to impose security theater on federal agencies. There's already enough of that within the federal government itself. The last thing we need is more.
What Wikileaks needs to do is focus on stuff like exposing Bank of America which it says it plans to do. What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their behavior has quite literally crippled the ability of the housing market in the US to function, ever, without radical political intervention to clean up the title disputes, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. It's more likely than not that their manipulations have us on the precipice of a depression that is far worse than the Great Depression. Sure, we found out that an extra 15k Iraqis died than we were officially told; the big banks have laid the foundation for an economic environment in which a lot of people in our own country may very well starve to death before it's all said and done.
If Assange's goal really is to clean house, then there are many targets that are softer, more inviting and more damning when exposed than most of what Wikileaks has accomplished with the DoD. If I had his ear, I'd tell him to go after Goldman Sachs. Go for the mother load of information from them. Get someone to hand over all of the server logs of communications between them and federal officials. Or better yet...
The Constitution rarely minces words. The simplest way of reading it is "when in doubt, don't." That's the way the 10th amendment was written. There are grey areas like "implied powers" such as being able to create the CIA to do civilian intelligence or the Air Force (as they are implied by the ability to raise military forces for military purposes), but on many things, there is no grey at all. Federal law enforcement, for example, has no jurisdiction to actually enforce any crime that happens only inside one state's borders unless that crime is enumerated in the Constitution as federal jurisdiction (like counterfeiting or treason). The DEA cannot constitutionally raid a medical marijuana dispensary in California unless that dispensary is doing a side business that crosses California's borders.
Liberals and many types on the right just happen to hate the limits the US Constitution imposes on their social agendas because they want to remake all of America in their image. It creates a very limited federal government. Congress was never intended to be where America did most of its legislative business. We'd be better off with very strict originalism, if for no other reason than it'd cripple the ability of lobbyists to use Congress to force their agenda on the whole country.
Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws. Let them get sued for lost wages, profits, trebble damages and emotional distress and suddenly we'll have 535 originalist legal scholars.
If anyone is going to do this, it should be the NSA, not DHS. Why, you ask, would I trust a military agency over DHS?
1) The NSA is regulated by DoD regulations which prevent it from working as a domestic law enforcement agency.
2) The NSA can very rarely share information with law enforcement because its methods are not legally admissible in most court cases (and they're not supposed to be, since the NSA's purpose is to support the military and operations abroad where civilian courts don't even have jurisdiction in many scenarios).
3) The NSA actually knows what it's doing with its own infosec, unlike DHS.
In a typical election, 40% of the vote goes one way, 40% goes the other. It's almost always unthinking party loyalty. There is no hope for most of those people. I know Democrats, for example, who vote Democrat despite the fact that Barack Obama, Reid and Pelosi have literally almost nothing in common with their views. It's all because "they're a Democrat/Republican family."
The points you raise are hardly insightful. Those problems have existed in literally every system of government from feudal monarchies, to Communism, to whatever-it-is-we-have-today. The establishment always plays hardball, no matter what form the establishment takes.
One of the interesting things our founders realized, like the Romans and others before them, is that a limited government with minorly democratic features is the closest thing to an ideal. If you look past the issue of slavery in the South, the US was the freest it ever was when it was the least democratic. The reason for that is simple: people in democratic states tolerate 5x more shit than those in nominally or outright undemocratic states in most cases because they don't have the pretense of "choosing their tyranny." Therefore, the government has to actually be judged on what it does, not the process by which it gets there (after which it gets a free pass because a temporary majority agreed with it).
if you allow any individual or group to gain more money than others, you practically give the power in their hands. no amount of 'equality' legislation in the political arena, can offset this economic power; the one with the gold makes the rule.
It's the damn voters. It's the voters who keep sending these sacks of shit back to DC.
The very fact that you can "spend your way into a seat" is an indictment of the voters and not the money. It means that most of them are so shallow and stupid that they act like a kitten caught between competing shiny things.
The only thing that'll fix our system is to find a way to disenfranchise such people.
Due to this, the killer is more dangerous to the general population than a normal killer.
Yes, in the sense that a serial killer is more dangerous than a one time killer. The motivation does not make that person more dangerous to society as a whole. In fact, such a killer is theoretically no more dangerous than a serial killer since serial killers usually target only 1 type of victim repeatedly.
Obviously not a good long term solution for this, but it was a necessary short term one.
Until someone invents a punishment worse than life imprisonment or execution, there is no better motivation than just throwing the book at them.
Hate crime laws were chickenshit from the git go on that one. Just throw the damn book at the bigot and give him a hanging instead of a lethal injection.
North Korea is very opaque, even for China and Russia. China can only go so far in assessing the state of North Korea through its official channels (even if they attach intel officers to their diplomatic mission). It's not like Chinese agents can mingle with the rest of society in North Korea like they could, if posing as "immigrant workers" or "tourists" in South Korea or Japan. This helps them get additional, cheap information.
IE 4.0 was a dramatic leap in quality over 3.0. Shockingly good compared to IE 3 and Netscape 4. Microsoft has already warned their competition that they fully intend to make IE9 really, really exploit the native capabilities of Windows. They don't intend it to be cross-platform in the least. Rather, it'll be built almost as a show piece for what modern Windows installations can do in its use of DirectX and other features.
If I were Google or Mozilla, I would regard this as a warning that "the empire is rearming, man the barricades."
The fact is that if Microsoft goes balls-to-the-wall on exploiting every last advanced feature of their OS, they might end up creating a product that can, at the very least, curb-stomp Firefox in performance.
Political factions are not siloed. They come together, mix, mutate and spread apart under a variety of circumstances, personalities, etc.
For example, I've known many religious conservatives who social views are "reactionary," but are functionally libertarian in their politics. Likewise, many liberals claim to be about individual freedom, but the policies they support (non-discrimination laws, speech codes, gun control, high taxes) when applied to individuals are extremely illiberal.
Most people cannot even get Fascism right. They think it's just "totalitarianism" or "corporations owning the government" (I've even had teachers say it is just "militant nationalism") rather than understanding that it is a fusion of right-wing and left-wing thought into a more advanced form of Socialism which attempts to achieve Socialist ends through a more market-oriented system (where the state generally directs, but doesn't explicitly own, private business through regulation).
In order to even train some sort of AI to figure this out, the developers would have to have an incredible level of domain knowledge of politics and history that would rival the level of knowledge that hardcore game designers typically have of Physics and Geometry.
I suppose they could do something like PageRank where they just assume that certain similarities imply a position in politics, but that won't be accurate for obvious reasons.
This is the inevitable outcome of having the operations side of the intelligence community gutted back in the 1970s by the Church Committee. There are two ways to organize intelligence: boots on the ground or an army of analysts who "use technology to make up for the lack of boots on the ground."
The American people want good, actionable intelligence without all of the sordid shit that the CIA did to get it back then. That's like a fat ass wanting to gorge herself with cake and have a body that rivals Gisele Bundchen or Heidi Klum.
9/11 was proof that the "we can use technology to replace an operations-focused intelligence apparatus" argument is a load of bullshit.
People shouldn't trust "scholars" on this subject. Just read the Constitution, it's right there. Here's a list of some great reasons why "legal scholars" are full of shit:
1) The 2nd amendment is composed of two halves: a prepositional phrase (the part about a militia and a free state) and legal language. Scholars, for years, have argued that a damn prepositional phrase, which only served to explain some of the thought process the founding fathers had, trumps the actual command enforced against Congress (the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed).
2) Legal scholars incorporated the first amendment against the states through the fourteenth amendment's privileges and immunities clause claiming it was as natural as breathing. For over a century they refused to acknowledge the same with the 2nd amendment. Ironic, since the first amendment explicitly mentions Congress in who shall not do the prohibiting, while the second amendment is already worded in such a way that it fits neatly against the states as well (as it does not mention Congress, in favor of a blanket prohibition).
3) Dred Scott.
4) Kelo v. New London's giant ass-raping of the public purpose clause of the 5th amendment.
"No organization granted incorporation shall be regarded as a human being for the purposes of this Constitution. All privileges and immunities secured by this Constitution, explicitly, shall apply to incorporated entities for the purposes of the laws of the United States. The 9th amendment shall not be interpreted as to convey any implied privileges or immunities to incorporated entities under United States law. No rights or immunities secured by this Constitution shall be incorporated against the several states through the 14th amendment or any other means. No court of the United States shall have jurisdiction to hear any case arising over state regulations of incorporate entities excepting such situations as there shall be a clear matter of interstate commerce. No activity that occurs primarily with a state's borders shall be construed as interstate commercial activity, even if it has an impact on interstate commerce. It shall be assumed in all matters involving United States judicial oversight of state regulations that the state possesses sovereign prerogative to regulate, alter and/or abolish the activity and existence of any incorporated entity chartered under its statutes or operating within its borders."
Under Ballmer, Microsoft has taken increasingly to working with the Internet as a standard than Bill Gates ever permitted. Like it or not, but the fact is that if Gates were still head honcho, Microsoft would not be bragging that IE9 will leave a smoking crater where its competition used to be---on standards compliance. Even if IE9 is imperfect there, the very fact that Microsoft is moving steadily in this direction is a massive corporate culture change over Gates where everything was about trapping developers and f#$%ing over everyone to stay on top.
It is probably unrealistic to expect Ballmer to do what I said. Mainly because he'd likely be ousted by the Board of Directors if he did what I said. They wouldn't "get" that Microsoft is a platform vendor first and foremost and that their platform is increasingly under attack mainly from corporation-backed commercial rivals.
Google, Apple and Oracle, their biggest competitors, are in a major shoot out.
What Microsoft needs to do is exploit the patent conflict by publicly ending its patent threats against FOSS. Completely, no exceptions.
While it does that, it should make Windows 8 the first release that breaks with the past by moving all legacy technologies into a sandbox a la what OS X originally did.
Finally, they should work on extending whatever POSIX compatibility they still have left until Windows 8 can reliably run code originally written on Linux and OS X. Why? Because it would bridge one of the last gaps between Windows 7 and OS X.
Apple is getting increasingly controversial. Microsoft could exploit by becoming the first vendor to make peace with everyone.
I've seen many bloggers, especially big bloggers with lots of advertising, reproduce the lion's share of a story and add so little commentary that even the most pro-fair use judge would have to conclude that it is an illegal infringement.
The main problem the media will face is that there is already a large swath of the population that hates it. Unfortunately for the MSM, these aren't people who are poor high school students.
Slashdot Mirror
What you failed to mention is that it is actually reasonably within the reach of most Americans because the media they need for speech is available in ways it isn't in China or Venezuela. There are thousands of companies that will sell you print supplies without fear that they'll face "reeducation through labor" for selling to you. There are dozens of video sharing sites. $200 buys you a Flip or something similar for making your own basic videos.
So, hopefully others will understand when I say "fuck you, you sniveling leftist brat."
They don't do any good anymore. Little inventors cannot even hope to sue a company like Intellectual Ventures unless they can find a lawyer willing--and able--to last years of litigation against the kind of legal resources such a company can focus on them. God help the poor SoB if IV retaliates by claiming infringement on half a dozen of its patents in the process of creating your own patent.
The reason people still support them is "fairness." It's not "fair" that people have great ideas but someone else monetizes them in a better way. Then someone says "they worked so hard and then someone stole the idea." All the hard work (misdirected or that produces nothing of value) in the world and a $1.50 still won't buy you a latte at Starbucks. As it shouldn't!
And ironically, all this system creates is one that is often unjust. Some poor guy who thinks he may become the next Bill Gates will probably have IV nuke him from orbit with a patent lawsuit right as he gets big enough that he's worth having Guido and Vinny, J.D. show up at his office with an offer he can't refuse ("hey, great idea you got going, it would be a shame if anything happened to it...")
Do a Google search. A decent looking search result shows up on the first page for "Obama Twitter connections."
Unless you are citing a specific study, in this day and age of good search engines, demanding "citations" for general topics is a form of trolling. It says "I'm too fucky lazy to do a 5 sec Google search."
Twitter, like Google, has been close to Obama. Wikileaks is making the Obama Administration (especially Hillary Clinton) look really bad both through the release of what was in those cables and their inability to "deal with" Wikileaks.
This is only slightly less retarded than asking why the mainstream media tends to run interference for Democrats, spinning everything they do in a positive light even if it's something that would have a Republican hanging from a cross on capitol hill.
Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if this were really implemented in a major way, it would create the ideal system for a terrorist group to discretely deliver several hundred bombs simultaneously all cross a major city.
Hey asshole, go back and reread what I actually wrote.
You see to think it's "oh noes, Johnny won't be able to buy the latest XBox 360 game."
What I wrote was that "Johnny, his family and much of his community will literally have the economy collapse around them."
Like most people, you seem to have no clue how badly the banks have screwed up. Well, let me clue you in...
1) They've literally destroyed the majority of the West's saved capital.
2) They've nearly destroyed the enforceability of the land title laws in at least the United States which means private home ownership, heck even eminent domain, is legally precarious since the system can longer resolve who owns what.
3) They've destroyed most of the capital that backs both private employers and governments alike.
You know what that means, sparky? It means that they've got a spasming finger resting on the reset button of our economies and political systems.
When that reset button finally gets hit, it means there won't be an efficient supply chain to get you munchies to eat while you get pissy on Slashdot. It means that if you live in an area that depends on a regular food shipments, there won't be anything to trade with and keep the shipments going.
It means most of the West will be looking at the worst depression it's ever seen. The sort of thing that used to exist only in the realm of academic theory and horror movies.
The majority of the classified information they've dump has been the sort of shit that the federal government produces in reams and forgets about. It's not "whistle-blower grade" materials like the Pentagon Papers. All it's likely to do is make the politicians more paranoid and to impose security theater on federal agencies. There's already enough of that within the federal government itself. The last thing we need is more.
What Wikileaks needs to do is focus on stuff like exposing Bank of America which it says it plans to do. What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their behavior has quite literally crippled the ability of the housing market in the US to function, ever, without radical political intervention to clean up the title disputes, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. It's more likely than not that their manipulations have us on the precipice of a depression that is far worse than the Great Depression. Sure, we found out that an extra 15k Iraqis died than we were officially told; the big banks have laid the foundation for an economic environment in which a lot of people in our own country may very well starve to death before it's all said and done.
If Assange's goal really is to clean house, then there are many targets that are softer, more inviting and more damning when exposed than most of what Wikileaks has accomplished with the DoD. If I had his ear, I'd tell him to go after Goldman Sachs. Go for the mother load of information from them. Get someone to hand over all of the server logs of communications between them and federal officials. Or better yet...
Target the Federal Reserve.
before Brooklyn brings in coyotes to take care of its new possum problem...
The Constitution rarely minces words. The simplest way of reading it is "when in doubt, don't." That's the way the 10th amendment was written. There are grey areas like "implied powers" such as being able to create the CIA to do civilian intelligence or the Air Force (as they are implied by the ability to raise military forces for military purposes), but on many things, there is no grey at all. Federal law enforcement, for example, has no jurisdiction to actually enforce any crime that happens only inside one state's borders unless that crime is enumerated in the Constitution as federal jurisdiction (like counterfeiting or treason). The DEA cannot constitutionally raid a medical marijuana dispensary in California unless that dispensary is doing a side business that crosses California's borders.
Liberals and many types on the right just happen to hate the limits the US Constitution imposes on their social agendas because they want to remake all of America in their image. It creates a very limited federal government. Congress was never intended to be where America did most of its legislative business. We'd be better off with very strict originalism, if for no other reason than it'd cripple the ability of lobbyists to use Congress to force their agenda on the whole country.
Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws. Let them get sued for lost wages, profits, trebble damages and emotional distress and suddenly we'll have 535 originalist legal scholars.
If anyone is going to do this, it should be the NSA, not DHS. Why, you ask, would I trust a military agency over DHS?
1) The NSA is regulated by DoD regulations which prevent it from working as a domestic law enforcement agency.
2) The NSA can very rarely share information with law enforcement because its methods are not legally admissible in most court cases (and they're not supposed to be, since the NSA's purpose is to support the military and operations abroad where civilian courts don't even have jurisdiction in many scenarios).
3) The NSA actually knows what it's doing with its own infosec, unlike DHS.
In a typical election, 40% of the vote goes one way, 40% goes the other. It's almost always unthinking party loyalty. There is no hope for most of those people. I know Democrats, for example, who vote Democrat despite the fact that Barack Obama, Reid and Pelosi have literally almost nothing in common with their views. It's all because "they're a Democrat/Republican family."
The points you raise are hardly insightful. Those problems have existed in literally every system of government from feudal monarchies, to Communism, to whatever-it-is-we-have-today. The establishment always plays hardball, no matter what form the establishment takes.
One of the interesting things our founders realized, like the Romans and others before them, is that a limited government with minorly democratic features is the closest thing to an ideal. If you look past the issue of slavery in the South, the US was the freest it ever was when it was the least democratic. The reason for that is simple: people in democratic states tolerate 5x more shit than those in nominally or outright undemocratic states in most cases because they don't have the pretense of "choosing their tyranny." Therefore, the government has to actually be judged on what it does, not the process by which it gets there (after which it gets a free pass because a temporary majority agreed with it).
It's the damn voters. It's the voters who keep sending these sacks of shit back to DC.
The very fact that you can "spend your way into a seat" is an indictment of the voters and not the money. It means that most of them are so shallow and stupid that they act like a kitten caught between competing shiny things.
The only thing that'll fix our system is to find a way to disenfranchise such people.
It's a testament to baby boomer narcissism that this is such a BFD from Apple.
Big new software update? No. Verizon iPhone? No. ZOMG U CAN HAZ BEETULZ ON TEH iPhone NOW!
If Disney opened up its vault, that'd at least make sense since they stop publishing a lot of their animated classics for long periods of time.
Yes, in the sense that a serial killer is more dangerous than a one time killer. The motivation does not make that person more dangerous to society as a whole. In fact, such a killer is theoretically no more dangerous than a serial killer since serial killers usually target only 1 type of victim repeatedly.
Until someone invents a punishment worse than life imprisonment or execution, there is no better motivation than just throwing the book at them.
Hate crime laws were chickenshit from the git go on that one. Just throw the damn book at the bigot and give him a hanging instead of a lethal injection.
North Korea is very opaque, even for China and Russia. China can only go so far in assessing the state of North Korea through its official channels (even if they attach intel officers to their diplomatic mission). It's not like Chinese agents can mingle with the rest of society in North Korea like they could, if posing as "immigrant workers" or "tourists" in South Korea or Japan. This helps them get additional, cheap information.
IE 4.0 was a dramatic leap in quality over 3.0. Shockingly good compared to IE 3 and Netscape 4. Microsoft has already warned their competition that they fully intend to make IE9 really, really exploit the native capabilities of Windows. They don't intend it to be cross-platform in the least. Rather, it'll be built almost as a show piece for what modern Windows installations can do in its use of DirectX and other features.
If I were Google or Mozilla, I would regard this as a warning that "the empire is rearming, man the barricades."
The fact is that if Microsoft goes balls-to-the-wall on exploiting every last advanced feature of their OS, they might end up creating a product that can, at the very least, curb-stomp Firefox in performance.
Political factions are not siloed. They come together, mix, mutate and spread apart under a variety of circumstances, personalities, etc.
For example, I've known many religious conservatives who social views are "reactionary," but are functionally libertarian in their politics. Likewise, many liberals claim to be about individual freedom, but the policies they support (non-discrimination laws, speech codes, gun control, high taxes) when applied to individuals are extremely illiberal.
Most people cannot even get Fascism right. They think it's just "totalitarianism" or "corporations owning the government" (I've even had teachers say it is just "militant nationalism") rather than understanding that it is a fusion of right-wing and left-wing thought into a more advanced form of Socialism which attempts to achieve Socialist ends through a more market-oriented system (where the state generally directs, but doesn't explicitly own, private business through regulation).
In order to even train some sort of AI to figure this out, the developers would have to have an incredible level of domain knowledge of politics and history that would rival the level of knowledge that hardcore game designers typically have of Physics and Geometry.
I suppose they could do something like PageRank where they just assume that certain similarities imply a position in politics, but that won't be accurate for obvious reasons.
This is the inevitable outcome of having the operations side of the intelligence community gutted back in the 1970s by the Church Committee. There are two ways to organize intelligence: boots on the ground or an army of analysts who "use technology to make up for the lack of boots on the ground."
The American people want good, actionable intelligence without all of the sordid shit that the CIA did to get it back then. That's like a fat ass wanting to gorge herself with cake and have a body that rivals Gisele Bundchen or Heidi Klum.
9/11 was proof that the "we can use technology to replace an operations-focused intelligence apparatus" argument is a load of bullshit.
People shouldn't trust "scholars" on this subject. Just read the Constitution, it's right there. Here's a list of some great reasons why "legal scholars" are full of shit:
1) The 2nd amendment is composed of two halves: a prepositional phrase (the part about a militia and a free state) and legal language. Scholars, for years, have argued that a damn prepositional phrase, which only served to explain some of the thought process the founding fathers had, trumps the actual command enforced against Congress (the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed).
2) Legal scholars incorporated the first amendment against the states through the fourteenth amendment's privileges and immunities clause claiming it was as natural as breathing. For over a century they refused to acknowledge the same with the 2nd amendment. Ironic, since the first amendment explicitly mentions Congress in who shall not do the prohibiting, while the second amendment is already worded in such a way that it fits neatly against the states as well (as it does not mention Congress, in favor of a blanket prohibition).
3) Dred Scott.
4) Kelo v. New London's giant ass-raping of the public purpose clause of the 5th amendment.
"No organization granted incorporation shall be regarded as a human being for the purposes of this Constitution. All privileges and immunities secured by this Constitution, explicitly, shall apply to incorporated entities for the purposes of the laws of the United States. The 9th amendment shall not be interpreted as to convey any implied privileges or immunities to incorporated entities under United States law. No rights or immunities secured by this Constitution shall be incorporated against the several states through the 14th amendment or any other means. No court of the United States shall have jurisdiction to hear any case arising over state regulations of incorporate entities excepting such situations as there shall be a clear matter of interstate commerce. No activity that occurs primarily with a state's borders shall be construed as interstate commercial activity, even if it has an impact on interstate commerce. It shall be assumed in all matters involving United States judicial oversight of state regulations that the state possesses sovereign prerogative to regulate, alter and/or abolish the activity and existence of any incorporated entity chartered under its statutes or operating within its borders."
Under Ballmer, Microsoft has taken increasingly to working with the Internet as a standard than Bill Gates ever permitted. Like it or not, but the fact is that if Gates were still head honcho, Microsoft would not be bragging that IE9 will leave a smoking crater where its competition used to be---on standards compliance. Even if IE9 is imperfect there, the very fact that Microsoft is moving steadily in this direction is a massive corporate culture change over Gates where everything was about trapping developers and f#$%ing over everyone to stay on top.
It is probably unrealistic to expect Ballmer to do what I said. Mainly because he'd likely be ousted by the Board of Directors if he did what I said. They wouldn't "get" that Microsoft is a platform vendor first and foremost and that their platform is increasingly under attack mainly from corporation-backed commercial rivals.
this would be the perfect time.
Google, Apple and Oracle, their biggest competitors, are in a major shoot out.
What Microsoft needs to do is exploit the patent conflict by publicly ending its patent threats against FOSS. Completely, no exceptions.
While it does that, it should make Windows 8 the first release that breaks with the past by moving all legacy technologies into a sandbox a la what OS X originally did.
Finally, they should work on extending whatever POSIX compatibility they still have left until Windows 8 can reliably run code originally written on Linux and OS X. Why? Because it would bridge one of the last gaps between Windows 7 and OS X.
Apple is getting increasingly controversial. Microsoft could exploit by becoming the first vendor to make peace with everyone.
I've seen many bloggers, especially big bloggers with lots of advertising, reproduce the lion's share of a story and add so little commentary that even the most pro-fair use judge would have to conclude that it is an illegal infringement.
The main problem the media will face is that there is already a large swath of the population that hates it. Unfortunately for the MSM, these aren't people who are poor high school students.