I learned a long time ago that you can almost always count on someone who talks about the "little guy" or the "wisdom of crowds" or some other populist crap to be trying to angle for something in the process. Populists are almost always out to manipulate someone and get something.
Hence I am not surprised in the least by this. The warning signs about Wikipedia have been there for a while now.
You don't have to work in IT to know that there is no reason for G-Archiver to send the password to anyone but Google. This guy deserves to be prosecuted under anti-hacking statutes.
What the publishers need to do is make an agreement with a few distribution channels to get their books out there in PDF format incredibly cheap. If I could buy a typical $8 paperback book on the iTMS and sync it to my iPod Touch for $3, I'd buy a lot more books. Not only that, but if you got it down to around $3, the publisher would have much fewer worries about piracy because it'd be clearly discounted for internet sales. One of the things that is just asinine is that most ebooks cost as much as the printed copies!
I've debated a few IP expansionists on a subject that would do much more to hamper piracy: bringing IP under state property laws. You catch someone making a business off of your IP without you releasing it for free? How does grand theft sound instead of "copyright infringement" if it's really property? You want to get rid of serial piracy, especially the for-profit kind? Throw the punks in with the guys who commit real felony property crimes.
Russia and China wink and nod when their people commit crimes against richer countries. Nigeria and other countries have many internet cafes which are havens to criminal enterprises, and that the police can't dismantle because they're so ineffective (and often the culture too is corrupt or sympathetic to the criminals because they target the "colonial powers" or some shit like that). It's failure or outright tolerance for this behavior on the part of government that is to blame.
As to the issue of experts, one of the biggest problems we have today is that many "intellectuals" think that their weight in one field carries over into another. The crossover here between history and science intellectuals is a good example. There are many scientists who sound like illiterate douchebags when they talk about history, and vice versa, yet their credentials give them undue weight.
IMO, the era of the public intellectual is over, and with that should come the end of an automatic assumption that experts are anything other than a one trick pony, unless they can prove otherwise.
In America, at least, we've had government records for a very long time on our citizens. You have to. Even court records have to be kept on people who've been brough to trial, convicted, sued, etc. Why wouldn't you want a unique ID number for each citizen and legal immigrant? Think of how much easier it'd be to tell TSA to piss off if the social security number had been turned into the Federal Identification Number. They tell you you're a terrorist, you tell them to check the FIN on the list, and lo and behold, wrong person, and they look like an idiot.
What is really upsetting isn't the ID number, but how much and what data the governments of the first world countries store on people.
1) An extension to the Bill of Rights: "it shall be incumbent upon the legislature to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any new grant of authority to government agencies, or restrictions on any right, secured by any article of any constitution, law or policy, shall be not only necessary, but be the only effective solution. The courts may strike down any grant of authority or restriction on a liberty covered by this statute, if anyone may prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the legislature was in error, and that a more effective, less invasive approach could have been implemented instead."
2) No intellectual property law shall circumvent state laws governing property, or common law property precedent or tradition.
Apple has failed to notice that there is nothing the iPhone's OS does that Android cannot do. Slap Android on a pure touchscreen phone and what do you have?
Oh, right. Instant replacement for the iPhone in the making, and it's open. Google is not being authoritarian like Apple.
Even Nintendo was not this bad back with the NES. Dear God, you'd think that Jobs wanted to have his coveted little space, even if it's small, just because he can be king of the compost pile over there.
Have you ever read a forum dominated by police who think that their violations of the law are justified in the line of duty? They think you ought to be grateful for them, as though you are some mewling little animal incapable of living in relative safety without them. These people aren't your congressman. They could give a shit less what you think. They think that you owe them a debt of gratitude for keeping you alive and free that's ten times higher than anything anyone in the military would feel.
Business method patents allow a company to take control over better ways of doing business. One of the ways that businesses can cut costs is by adopting proven methods for increasing the efficiency of basic operations. This is common sense to anyone who gives it more than 10 seconds of thought. Should Starbucks be able to own a patent on the process of saving money by making a universal lid for its different sized cups? I don't think so because the cost to the economy is decreased efficiency at every other coffee shop that is barred from using this process without paying Starbucks.
The simplest reason for not supporting business method patents from a pro-IP POV is that the business that discovers the process will already benefit greatly if it can implement it internally, and no business method patent is going to be unique enough to warrant the sort of protection given to bonafide scientific discoveries.
At a minimum we'll lose by either having a cranky old geezer who likes to throw his weight around in office through wars and limits on the Bill of Rights. The flipside is that we will end up with two tax-and-spend leftists who are both weak on civil liberties.
Those of us who remember the Clinton years from a civil liberties side remember that it was only less bad that the Bush years because the Clintons didn't have the convenient excuse of terrorism. OKC doesn't count because they dismantled the group responsible for that without much effort. McVeigh did not have the sort of connections that justified making him into the sort of boogeyman that Bin Laden could be.
I for one am sick and tired of hearing about change from everyone. No one is proposing change, unless by change you mean making us worse off than we already are. Here's a thought for all three: real change would be running on a campaign to severely limit the ability of the federal government to tax and regulate American citizens' lives instead of coming up with grandiose policies for spending our money and telling us what to do.
As I said, we'll lose no matter who wins, short of all three of these candidates dropping dead and Ron Paul being the last man standing with appeal to both sides.
And with the way that people spew out personal information on Facebook and MySpace, they probably figure that if they get it just right, there's the potential to hit the motherload of information for identity theft.
When Google announced the availability of the Android SDK, Apple should have seen that as a shot across their bow. It's just not occurred to them that if Android really works out in the real world the way that their slimmed down OSX does, that they're going to run the serious risk of having to play catch up with Google.
Apple should have released an SDK for the iPod Touch that gives full access to the system on both the iPod Touch and iPhone when the iPhone is not on a cellular network. A certification process for the code that interacts with a cellular network is one thing, but all of this rumored crap about the restrictions should have been dispelled by Steve Jobs announcing it as a general SDK open to everyone.
All it's going to take to kick the iPhone squarely in the balls is for someone to make a very sleak Android-based phone that has no developer restrictions on it. People are going to write good software for Android, and then Apple is going to have to convince casual users why they should pay for a phone that doesn't have all of the cool features and add-ons that are free or cheap for Android.
In those households where parents actually give a rat's posterior about raising their kids, protect them from being prosecuted for child abuse for spanking or whipping their kids with a belt for consuming pornography and such.
If parents can't punish their kids worse than yelling at them or taking away their computer for breaking the family rules on not watching porn, how can you expect parents to keep their kids under control?
When my wife was in high school, she did a study for a class. She went around and asked the girls she knew if they had been spanked or otherwise physically disciplined when they broke the rules growing up. Those who had, the majority of them were the well-adjusted, decent girls. The rest fit many negative stereotypes...
There was an ironic article about outlawing such discipline in California. The state representative said that she'd never support such discipline because she would never spank her cat because some ill-informed vet told her it would do no good. Heh. I grew up with cats, and can tell you that if you spank them when they break the rules, they tend to behave well like any other pet. The reason we have most of these parenting issues is because many families treat their kids the way that they would treat a cat based on common behavior toward cats.
The most frequent argument I see for patents is that they protect the little guy from the big guy. Most of us know that this is not true, and is typical of the sort of academic, only-on-paper models that are so common to professors and think tank policy wonks. In practice, the little guy can easily get wiped away by the patent system.
Let's say that I make a system that does the same thing as one of its many features. I'm a little guy, they're a little guy too. They sue me into oblivion over something that is not a unique idea.
By providing economics students with an excellent case study on what rent-seeking looks like, and why the law should seek to make it as legally difficult as possible.
Sean Sturgeon confessed to killing eight people. If I were the homicide detective, you damn well better believe I'd be urging the prosecutor to dismiss the charges without prejudice so that the scope of the investigation could be brought to bear on HIM, now. The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale. Hans might be the killer, but if I were a cop, I'd have spat my coffee out all over the report in shock when I read that Nina had gotten herself involved with a guy who sounds like a real nutjob who probably killed her.
Unless they found Nina's blood all over Reiser's car, they don't have much to go on. Even then, it's not unrealistic to think that Sturgeon might have tried to frame Reiser.
The details of this case are very sordid. I wouldn't put it past the prosecutors to be ignoring sturgeon's high probability of guilt out of pride because they "have their man." This is one of the reasons why I unabashedly support making it impossible to give a life sentence or execution without a minimum of two credible witnesses, and serious penalties (that can include execution in murder cases) for those who commit perjury.
Having a political party come into office that is dedicated to taking an engineer's eye to fixing the legal code of the entire state. The last figure I saw for the cost to businesses to comply with federal income tax requirements was $289B. Just going to a flat tax would be an automatic release of $289B worth of labor! There are so many messed up statutes and regulations that a savvy political party wouldn't even need to do much in the way of cutting taxes. All it would have to do is start repealing old laws left and right when they no longer make sense, and find ways to optimize the existing regulations that are still needed.
A better use for that money would be to hire people who have demonstrated strong work experience and education in technical fields. When he's up for retirement, a close relative of mine would be a great pick. He has experience in a number of very, very technical areas of Computer Science, and if you gave him a research staff to work under him, and good pay, he could easily rip patents like these to shreds. The problem is, the government would never pay an engineer with the depth of education and work experience that he has a salary commensurate with what he could bring to bear at an agency like the USPTO.
Nothing will change until two things happen: the government conforms to private sector at-will employment, and it stops being stingy with pay for qualified people. Then again, this is the same institution that will try to save money on the military by spending $1B on a stealth bomber, and then haggle over the salary of the pilots.
I recently began testing some RSS and Atom parsing modules for Movable Type that I wrote, and noticed that they were breaking on different feeds that Google Reader handles easily. When I looked at the RSS and Atom markup, I noticed that the reason was that the various generators that were causing problems weren't always generating RSS and Atom in the way that I expected. WordPress.com, for example, was using content:encoded tags for some of the content for blog posts, and had an empty description tag in that item block.
It's XML, not HTML, so it's not going to be as hard to get working if its done as properly formatted XML, but one problem I have is with the ad-hoc mixing of tags. If you are going to provide a syndication feed or something to that effect, using a standard, and stick to it, even if there are limitations to the standard.
There is absolutely not a single good reason for anyone outside of a handful of employees at the Department of Justice who investigate copyright infringement and pornography to have Limewire installed on a government machine. That is precisely how the head of Limewire should have responded to Congress.
There are some limited applications for P2P in the government, but not an implementation like Limewire.
But then, why am I not surprised that Congress once again doesn't do the job we pay them to do? See, this is why I have come to the conclusion that maybe we need to call a new constitutional convention through state legislatures, and add in a constitutional amendment that contains an entire article of civil and criminal liability for each part of the body politic.
Personally, I think legislators ought to be held civilly and criminally liable where necessary for the negative outcomes of their laws. They don't hesitate to hold engineers, doctors, programmers, etc. accountable for their mistakes. Here's turnabout for them:
1) Establish two legal distinctions: misdemeanor and felony unconstitutionality. The distinction is that felony unconstitutionality is a blatant, obvious to anyone, violation of the constitution such as passing a gun ban in direct violation of the 2nd amendment or outlawing political speech. Everytime a law is declared unconstitutional, everyone who voted for it gets effectively put on trial. If it's at the Supreme Court, everyone gets sanctioned, without right to a trial, for supporting it. I mean, at that point, how could you argue that they should get their day in court when it is the SCOTUS ruling against their law?
2) Allow private citizens to sue members of Congress for loss of life, liberty, property and/or emotional distress caused by the enforcement of any unconstitutional law.
3) Declare that the only political activity that can be legally done while Congress is in session is government-related work. Make campaigning effectively timecard fraud that can cost the legislator their position. Allow the leadership of both parts of Congress to sanction members who go on a tangent like Arlen Spectre going after the NFL. Repeat offenders can be censored from entering Congress for up to one month. Imagine going back home to your district, and having to explain why you were so off topic from what is constitutional, that the Speaker of the House told you to shut up and go home. That's great for reelection.
I gleefully welcome the destruction of the mainstream media. Why? Despite touting itself as a watchdog, the media is quite possibly the single biggest enemy that "democracy" and liberty have in the United States. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that whatever can be said of Bush and Cheney, the mainstream media beats them by a wide margin. It doesn't criticize the government except a few politicians, it almost never holds corrupt and abusive government employees accountable, and it rarely provides a voice for actually holding the government by the short hairs and making it fess up.
There is a case that, for me, was the last straw. It was written in the Pilot, which is a major Virginia media outlet. I have a write up here showing how much of a f$%^ing lapdog the media was in not questioning how the police carried out this raid. The reports have only gotten worse, including it appears to be that the police conducted this raid after knowing that their own informant committed a felony against the poor guy by breaking into his home 3 days before the raid (might explain why he was trigger happy when the police raided the house 3 days later at night while he was in bed).
The media has two modes when it comes to their traditional role of watchdog: lapdog and psychotic attack dog that turns on the children. They'll either damn near cover stuff up, or make a mountain out of a molehill, when there are plenty of good examples that would get the public furious for good reasons.
What is this? Some bullshit concept of "journalist ethics and social responsibility" at work? I don't buy the corporate angle that much because if they reported half of the shit that makes it to civil libertarian blogs and kept up with it, they'd have more naturally occurring controversy to sell ads with than the law should allow.
So, I say bring it on to the mainstream media. There are plenty of lightweight media outlets that aren't barely more than Associated Press resellers, and they're going up against Craigslist, a 800lb gorilla in the classifieds market now.
Does he realize what he'd have to do on corruption
on
Lessig For Congress?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A large part of the problem with corruption is the red tape that the corrupt can hide behind. What we need is a sort of "root" user for one or two agencies that can essentially violate any law or policy inside the government, short of the constitution itself, to root out corruption. I'd suggest greatly expanding the size and scope of the Offices of the Inspector General, such that when an IG agent steps foot inside of a federal agency, they are more terrifying that Tomas De Torquemada to those with something to hide.
When the agents of the IG get probable cause to investigate, I'd suggest that they have the following police powers internal to the federal government, that go well above and beyond anything regular police can do:
1) An IG agent, in their federal department, has automatic root access to all compartmentalized information. 2) No federal employee can refuse to speak with an IG agent. Refusal to do so is grounds to be blacklisted from ever working for the federal government or on a government contract. 3) Each director of an Inspector General's office is appointed for at least 3 presidential elections, and cannot be removed except by impeachment. 4) The IG is in no way legally accountable to the President, and can willfully disobey even legal orders from the President. 5) Refusal to give an IG agent satisfactory answers to any question is automatic criminal guilt of obstruction of justice.
Until lawyers are prohibited by constitutional amendment from serving within the body politic. Having held an active license to practice law within the last ten years should automatically disqualify you from being a legislator. It's a pure, textbook case of conflict of interest to allow lawyers to write the laws that they will be arguing because they're the ones who will be profiting from how those laws are written.
You wonder why medical care costs so much? Part of it is because you have people like John Edwards who make a killing off of suing hospitals using piss-poor science and badly drafted civil laws, and then his ass is protected by the other trial lawyers who serve in the North Carolina state legislature, and who will fight tooth and nail to prevent tort reform from killing off much of their livelihood (suing every doctor who happens to be at the scene of an unfortunate birth defect, not one who is actually guilty of malpractice as conclusively proven).
I for one am perfectly willing to sacrifice the modern democratic ideals that people mindlessly hold to in order to fix the system. I don't believe it's a natural right of every citizen to vote or to hold office. The greater public good even demands that certain types of people be disenfranchised. Such people include government employees and contractors, but it can't entirely stop there, in order to limit the power of those who have a vested interest in keeping the system working to fill up their wallets.
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The Democrats also choose pork barrel politics to police accountability. What else is new? Congress gets paid for making the system work for some people, not the people.
I learned a long time ago that you can almost always count on someone who talks about the "little guy" or the "wisdom of crowds" or some other populist crap to be trying to angle for something in the process. Populists are almost always out to manipulate someone and get something.
Hence I am not surprised in the least by this. The warning signs about Wikipedia have been there for a while now.
You don't have to work in IT to know that there is no reason for G-Archiver to send the password to anyone but Google. This guy deserves to be prosecuted under anti-hacking statutes.
What the publishers need to do is make an agreement with a few distribution channels to get their books out there in PDF format incredibly cheap. If I could buy a typical $8 paperback book on the iTMS and sync it to my iPod Touch for $3, I'd buy a lot more books. Not only that, but if you got it down to around $3, the publisher would have much fewer worries about piracy because it'd be clearly discounted for internet sales. One of the things that is just asinine is that most ebooks cost as much as the printed copies!
I've debated a few IP expansionists on a subject that would do much more to hamper piracy: bringing IP under state property laws. You catch someone making a business off of your IP without you releasing it for free? How does grand theft sound instead of "copyright infringement" if it's really property? You want to get rid of serial piracy, especially the for-profit kind? Throw the punks in with the guys who commit real felony property crimes.
Of course that's assuming IP is real property...
Russia and China wink and nod when their people commit crimes against richer countries. Nigeria and other countries have many internet cafes which are havens to criminal enterprises, and that the police can't dismantle because they're so ineffective (and often the culture too is corrupt or sympathetic to the criminals because they target the "colonial powers" or some shit like that). It's failure or outright tolerance for this behavior on the part of government that is to blame.
As to the issue of experts, one of the biggest problems we have today is that many "intellectuals" think that their weight in one field carries over into another. The crossover here between history and science intellectuals is a good example. There are many scientists who sound like illiterate douchebags when they talk about history, and vice versa, yet their credentials give them undue weight.
IMO, the era of the public intellectual is over, and with that should come the end of an automatic assumption that experts are anything other than a one trick pony, unless they can prove otherwise.
In America, at least, we've had government records for a very long time on our citizens. You have to. Even court records have to be kept on people who've been brough to trial, convicted, sued, etc. Why wouldn't you want a unique ID number for each citizen and legal immigrant? Think of how much easier it'd be to tell TSA to piss off if the social security number had been turned into the Federal Identification Number. They tell you you're a terrorist, you tell them to check the FIN on the list, and lo and behold, wrong person, and they look like an idiot.
What is really upsetting isn't the ID number, but how much and what data the governments of the first world countries store on people.
1) An extension to the Bill of Rights: "it shall be incumbent upon the legislature to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any new grant of authority to government agencies, or restrictions on any right, secured by any article of any constitution, law or policy, shall be not only necessary, but be the only effective solution. The courts may strike down any grant of authority or restriction on a liberty covered by this statute, if anyone may prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the legislature was in error, and that a more effective, less invasive approach could have been implemented instead."
2) No intellectual property law shall circumvent state laws governing property, or common law property precedent or tradition.
Apple has failed to notice that there is nothing the iPhone's OS does that Android cannot do. Slap Android on a pure touchscreen phone and what do you have?
Oh, right. Instant replacement for the iPhone in the making, and it's open. Google is not being authoritarian like Apple.
Even Nintendo was not this bad back with the NES. Dear God, you'd think that Jobs wanted to have his coveted little space, even if it's small, just because he can be king of the compost pile over there.
Have you ever read a forum dominated by police who think that their violations of the law are justified in the line of duty? They think you ought to be grateful for them, as though you are some mewling little animal incapable of living in relative safety without them. These people aren't your congressman. They could give a shit less what you think. They think that you owe them a debt of gratitude for keeping you alive and free that's ten times higher than anything anyone in the military would feel.
Business method patents allow a company to take control over better ways of doing business. One of the ways that businesses can cut costs is by adopting proven methods for increasing the efficiency of basic operations. This is common sense to anyone who gives it more than 10 seconds of thought. Should Starbucks be able to own a patent on the process of saving money by making a universal lid for its different sized cups? I don't think so because the cost to the economy is decreased efficiency at every other coffee shop that is barred from using this process without paying Starbucks.
The simplest reason for not supporting business method patents from a pro-IP POV is that the business that discovers the process will already benefit greatly if it can implement it internally, and no business method patent is going to be unique enough to warrant the sort of protection given to bonafide scientific discoveries.
At a minimum we'll lose by either having a cranky old geezer who likes to throw his weight around in office through wars and limits on the Bill of Rights. The flipside is that we will end up with two tax-and-spend leftists who are both weak on civil liberties.
Those of us who remember the Clinton years from a civil liberties side remember that it was only less bad that the Bush years because the Clintons didn't have the convenient excuse of terrorism. OKC doesn't count because they dismantled the group responsible for that without much effort. McVeigh did not have the sort of connections that justified making him into the sort of boogeyman that Bin Laden could be.
I for one am sick and tired of hearing about change from everyone. No one is proposing change, unless by change you mean making us worse off than we already are. Here's a thought for all three: real change would be running on a campaign to severely limit the ability of the federal government to tax and regulate American citizens' lives instead of coming up with grandiose policies for spending our money and telling us what to do.
As I said, we'll lose no matter who wins, short of all three of these candidates dropping dead and Ron Paul being the last man standing with appeal to both sides.
And with the way that people spew out personal information on Facebook and MySpace, they probably figure that if they get it just right, there's the potential to hit the motherload of information for identity theft.
Don't believe everything you read online, from any source. MSM, bloggers, etc. Look at what they're saying and evaluate it against other information.
When Google announced the availability of the Android SDK, Apple should have seen that as a shot across their bow. It's just not occurred to them that if Android really works out in the real world the way that their slimmed down OSX does, that they're going to run the serious risk of having to play catch up with Google.
Apple should have released an SDK for the iPod Touch that gives full access to the system on both the iPod Touch and iPhone when the iPhone is not on a cellular network. A certification process for the code that interacts with a cellular network is one thing, but all of this rumored crap about the restrictions should have been dispelled by Steve Jobs announcing it as a general SDK open to everyone.
All it's going to take to kick the iPhone squarely in the balls is for someone to make a very sleak Android-based phone that has no developer restrictions on it. People are going to write good software for Android, and then Apple is going to have to convince casual users why they should pay for a phone that doesn't have all of the cool features and add-ons that are free or cheap for Android.
In those households where parents actually give a rat's posterior about raising their kids, protect them from being prosecuted for child abuse for spanking or whipping their kids with a belt for consuming pornography and such.
If parents can't punish their kids worse than yelling at them or taking away their computer for breaking the family rules on not watching porn, how can you expect parents to keep their kids under control?
When my wife was in high school, she did a study for a class. She went around and asked the girls she knew if they had been spanked or otherwise physically disciplined when they broke the rules growing up. Those who had, the majority of them were the well-adjusted, decent girls. The rest fit many negative stereotypes...
There was an ironic article about outlawing such discipline in California. The state representative said that she'd never support such discipline because she would never spank her cat because some ill-informed vet told her it would do no good. Heh. I grew up with cats, and can tell you that if you spank them when they break the rules, they tend to behave well like any other pet. The reason we have most of these parenting issues is because many families treat their kids the way that they would treat a cat based on common behavior toward cats.
The most frequent argument I see for patents is that they protect the little guy from the big guy. Most of us know that this is not true, and is typical of the sort of academic, only-on-paper models that are so common to professors and think tank policy wonks. In practice, the little guy can easily get wiped away by the patent system.
Let's say that I make a system that does the same thing as one of its many features. I'm a little guy, they're a little guy too. They sue me into oblivion over something that is not a unique idea.
By providing economics students with an excellent case study on what rent-seeking looks like, and why the law should seek to make it as legally difficult as possible.
Sean Sturgeon confessed to killing eight people. If I were the homicide detective, you damn well better believe I'd be urging the prosecutor to dismiss the charges without prejudice so that the scope of the investigation could be brought to bear on HIM, now. The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale. Hans might be the killer, but if I were a cop, I'd have spat my coffee out all over the report in shock when I read that Nina had gotten herself involved with a guy who sounds like a real nutjob who probably killed her.
Unless they found Nina's blood all over Reiser's car, they don't have much to go on. Even then, it's not unrealistic to think that Sturgeon might have tried to frame Reiser.
The details of this case are very sordid. I wouldn't put it past the prosecutors to be ignoring sturgeon's high probability of guilt out of pride because they "have their man." This is one of the reasons why I unabashedly support making it impossible to give a life sentence or execution without a minimum of two credible witnesses, and serious penalties (that can include execution in murder cases) for those who commit perjury.
Having a political party come into office that is dedicated to taking an engineer's eye to fixing the legal code of the entire state. The last figure I saw for the cost to businesses to comply with federal income tax requirements was $289B. Just going to a flat tax would be an automatic release of $289B worth of labor! There are so many messed up statutes and regulations that a savvy political party wouldn't even need to do much in the way of cutting taxes. All it would have to do is start repealing old laws left and right when they no longer make sense, and find ways to optimize the existing regulations that are still needed.
A better use for that money would be to hire people who have demonstrated strong work experience and education in technical fields. When he's up for retirement, a close relative of mine would be a great pick. He has experience in a number of very, very technical areas of Computer Science, and if you gave him a research staff to work under him, and good pay, he could easily rip patents like these to shreds. The problem is, the government would never pay an engineer with the depth of education and work experience that he has a salary commensurate with what he could bring to bear at an agency like the USPTO.
Nothing will change until two things happen: the government conforms to private sector at-will employment, and it stops being stingy with pay for qualified people. Then again, this is the same institution that will try to save money on the military by spending $1B on a stealth bomber, and then haggle over the salary of the pilots.
I recently began testing some RSS and Atom parsing modules for Movable Type that I wrote, and noticed that they were breaking on different feeds that Google Reader handles easily. When I looked at the RSS and Atom markup, I noticed that the reason was that the various generators that were causing problems weren't always generating RSS and Atom in the way that I expected. WordPress.com, for example, was using content:encoded tags for some of the content for blog posts, and had an empty description tag in that item block.
It's XML, not HTML, so it's not going to be as hard to get working if its done as properly formatted XML, but one problem I have is with the ad-hoc mixing of tags. If you are going to provide a syndication feed or something to that effect, using a standard, and stick to it, even if there are limitations to the standard.
There is absolutely not a single good reason for anyone outside of a handful of employees at the Department of Justice who investigate copyright infringement and pornography to have Limewire installed on a government machine. That is precisely how the head of Limewire should have responded to Congress.
There are some limited applications for P2P in the government, but not an implementation like Limewire.
But then, why am I not surprised that Congress once again doesn't do the job we pay them to do? See, this is why I have come to the conclusion that maybe we need to call a new constitutional convention through state legislatures, and add in a constitutional amendment that contains an entire article of civil and criminal liability for each part of the body politic.
Personally, I think legislators ought to be held civilly and criminally liable where necessary for the negative outcomes of their laws. They don't hesitate to hold engineers, doctors, programmers, etc. accountable for their mistakes. Here's turnabout for them:
1) Establish two legal distinctions: misdemeanor and felony unconstitutionality. The distinction is that felony unconstitutionality is a blatant, obvious to anyone, violation of the constitution such as passing a gun ban in direct violation of the 2nd amendment or outlawing political speech. Everytime a law is declared unconstitutional, everyone who voted for it gets effectively put on trial. If it's at the Supreme Court, everyone gets sanctioned, without right to a trial, for supporting it. I mean, at that point, how could you argue that they should get their day in court when it is the SCOTUS ruling against their law?
2) Allow private citizens to sue members of Congress for loss of life, liberty, property and/or emotional distress caused by the enforcement of any unconstitutional law.
3) Declare that the only political activity that can be legally done while Congress is in session is government-related work. Make campaigning effectively timecard fraud that can cost the legislator their position. Allow the leadership of both parts of Congress to sanction members who go on a tangent like Arlen Spectre going after the NFL. Repeat offenders can be censored from entering Congress for up to one month. Imagine going back home to your district, and having to explain why you were so off topic from what is constitutional, that the Speaker of the House told you to shut up and go home. That's great for reelection.
I gleefully welcome the destruction of the mainstream media. Why? Despite touting itself as a watchdog, the media is quite possibly the single biggest enemy that "democracy" and liberty have in the United States. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that whatever can be said of Bush and Cheney, the mainstream media beats them by a wide margin. It doesn't criticize the government except a few politicians, it almost never holds corrupt and abusive government employees accountable, and it rarely provides a voice for actually holding the government by the short hairs and making it fess up.
There is a case that, for me, was the last straw. It was written in the Pilot, which is a major Virginia media outlet. I have a write up here showing how much of a f$%^ing lapdog the media was in not questioning how the police carried out this raid. The reports have only gotten worse, including it appears to be that the police conducted this raid after knowing that their own informant committed a felony against the poor guy by breaking into his home 3 days before the raid (might explain why he was trigger happy when the police raided the house 3 days later at night while he was in bed).
The media has two modes when it comes to their traditional role of watchdog: lapdog and psychotic attack dog that turns on the children. They'll either damn near cover stuff up, or make a mountain out of a molehill, when there are plenty of good examples that would get the public furious for good reasons.
What is this? Some bullshit concept of "journalist ethics and social responsibility" at work? I don't buy the corporate angle that much because if they reported half of the shit that makes it to civil libertarian blogs and kept up with it, they'd have more naturally occurring controversy to sell ads with than the law should allow.
So, I say bring it on to the mainstream media. There are plenty of lightweight media outlets that aren't barely more than Associated Press resellers, and they're going up against Craigslist, a 800lb gorilla in the classifieds market now.
A large part of the problem with corruption is the red tape that the corrupt can hide behind. What we need is a sort of "root" user for one or two agencies that can essentially violate any law or policy inside the government, short of the constitution itself, to root out corruption. I'd suggest greatly expanding the size and scope of the Offices of the Inspector General, such that when an IG agent steps foot inside of a federal agency, they are more terrifying that Tomas De Torquemada to those with something to hide.
When the agents of the IG get probable cause to investigate, I'd suggest that they have the following police powers internal to the federal government, that go well above and beyond anything regular police can do:
1) An IG agent, in their federal department, has automatic root access to all compartmentalized information.
2) No federal employee can refuse to speak with an IG agent. Refusal to do so is grounds to be blacklisted from ever working for the federal government or on a government contract.
3) Each director of an Inspector General's office is appointed for at least 3 presidential elections, and cannot be removed except by impeachment.
4) The IG is in no way legally accountable to the President, and can willfully disobey even legal orders from the President.
5) Refusal to give an IG agent satisfactory answers to any question is automatic criminal guilt of obstruction of justice.
Until lawyers are prohibited by constitutional amendment from serving within the body politic. Having held an active license to practice law within the last ten years should automatically disqualify you from being a legislator. It's a pure, textbook case of conflict of interest to allow lawyers to write the laws that they will be arguing because they're the ones who will be profiting from how those laws are written.
You wonder why medical care costs so much? Part of it is because you have people like John Edwards who make a killing off of suing hospitals using piss-poor science and badly drafted civil laws, and then his ass is protected by the other trial lawyers who serve in the North Carolina state legislature, and who will fight tooth and nail to prevent tort reform from killing off much of their livelihood (suing every doctor who happens to be at the scene of an unfortunate birth defect, not one who is actually guilty of malpractice as conclusively proven).
I for one am perfectly willing to sacrifice the modern democratic ideals that people mindlessly hold to in order to fix the system. I don't believe it's a natural right of every citizen to vote or to hold office. The greater public good even demands that certain types of people be disenfranchised. Such people include government employees and contractors, but it can't entirely stop there, in order to limit the power of those who have a vested interest in keeping the system working to fill up their wallets.