When you get a Top Secret clearance that is high enough to get you into real work on national security, you agree to submit anything you say about your job to government scrutiny and they, and their superiors, have veto authority. Period.
And get this... the first amendment doesn't cover classified information. You have no constitutional right to publish state secrets, and the US Constitution does not recognize "people power" no matter what some might like to think. It is fully legal for them to tell the NYT that if they know what's good for them, they'll censor a report that contains redacted information.
Oh and before anyone bitches, not just any information can be classified. You can get information legally declassified against the President's wishes if you can prove that it is not germane to national security. The law only allows classification of information related to national security, and that's not something the President is legally above reproach on.
They're winners, not losers like Netscape and to a lesser extent, Sun. They don't go running to big mama regulator to help them out from the mean old Microsoft bully. Instead they shrug stuff like this off and fight harder. That's why I expect them to be around in the next decade as a strong contender. They understand the rules of the marketplace, one of which is that it's easier to win if you focus on building a product rather than trying to sell a sob story to regulators about the unfairness of having to compete against bigger companies using their influence to attack you.
You have to give the MySQL guys credit for the fact that it is an incredibly easy product when it comes to configuring it for your needs. For me, out of college, going to Oracle was a culture shock because the process of configuring Oracle was so convoluted and drawn out for simple stuff. I know that Oracle and PostgreSQL can be much more powerful than MySQL, but there is something to be said for how easy it is for a developer to install MySQL and just start working with it.
It will cause a legal battle similar to the one over whether porn in the browser cache counts as possession. I predict that within a few years of this becoming law, some prosecutor will argue that you are responsible for the content that is moderated down by your spam filters. For those that don't know, in WordPress, Movable Type and probably others, spam is not by default automatically deleted. It's stored in the database with a flag on it that keeps it from being published when a page is sent. Why do I make this assumption? Because prosecutors are probably the ultimate assholes in law enforcement, who make a career often out of using every nook and cranny of a law to exact the maximum punishment they can get to advance their career.
But then, according to Wikipedia, it's not like most of the countries involved have any significant amount of the development costs at stake. The UK is the biggest contributor, and it foots only 10% of the bill. It's not cool, but it's to be expected. Hopefully these countries will learn to not invest money into American hardware except when they are buying it with the expectation that it is full featured.
Let's also be a little realistic here. No country with military hardware as advanced as the United States, Japan, Russia or Israel is going to play entirely fair when selling to other countries. No country wants to risk its prize weapon systems falling into unsavory hands when it's fully functional. Personally, I would be surprised if the MiGs that Russia sells to China and other countries are as kick ass as some of the stuff their own air force uses.
As I said a while ago, with hardware that low-powered, it becomes mostly a replacement for pen and paper, not something to use as a foundation for really teaching much cool stuff. The fact that it is also going to end up being an extremely expensive program doesn't surprise me either. $970 per kid is a lot for this thing no matter how you look at it. From an American POV, we'd call that a wasteful social program. To a third world country or one that is very much struggling to really become a first world country, it's a very, very expensive program to not do a pilot program.
You want to help the poor do cool things abroad? Follow Muhammad Yunus' example. His micro-credit system will probably do 20x more in the long run to raise the quality of life in the countries that follow his model than the OLPC could ever even dream of being part of.
When I have kids, I plan to tell that while it's technically not stealing, it's just plain dishonest. If a band, regardless of popular, has made music that they like and have copied, they owe the band a good faith effort to pay for the music. What's so hard about that? Even if you think it's not stealing, why is it so hard to say that you should compensate someone for making stuff you like? Don't even try the record label excuse because it actually does help a band out financially if you buy the CD since it helps them get out of debt. Since all of the bands I like are signed to a record label of some size, talk about not supporting the labels is for me, well, cheap.
Now if you want to nail the guy, you should get a reporter to ask him whether or not he classifies his kids' downloading as theft and if so, how does he feel as a father knowing that his kids are thieves. Let his own words save him or hang him high.
As for me, I have to snicker that an industry that has so thoroughly attacked Judao-Christian morality is finally reaping the socialist entitlement mentality whirlwind that it has sewn.
for leftists. Too busy fighting in the economy to get involved in any big way in politics. Then they provoked the ire of the Clinton Administration and well, Microsoft has discovered the joys of lobbying!
What's ironic about it is that Linux and OSX would still have enjoyed tremendous success if the antitrust case never happened. Both of those have gotten where they are squarely on technical and aesthetic grounds (both in the latter's case). The anti-trust case was nothing more than a few losers like Sun and Netscape whining and moaning about getting their asses kicked by Microsoft.
Now, congratulations, people. You've awakened a sleeping giant. How do you like them apples?
And just think of who fits that demographic
on
Apples Are For Grannies?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The baby boomers! The most self-absorbed generation of Americans who largely continue to live in denial about the fact that they are very close to being "senior citizens" instead of the "hip youth" they were back in the 60s and 70s!
Now all they have to do is whip out that credit card to get junior or little susie some new popularity! Or just get them some superficial attention from their friends. "Dude, how did that dork get with all of those hot chicks?!" Ah, more whitewashing of problems...
Government is not a well-oiled machine. It's a vast expanse of bureaucracy, backroom deals, corruption, coercion and many other things. So stop treating it like one and doing that feel good song and dance about "we the people are the government" as an excuse for letting it dictate standards, regulate all over the place, etc. This is the way that government works in practice. The more you invite it into your life, the more of this sort of villainy you will invite in general.
Increasingly people don't trust things that they aren't very familiar with because of the sort of political, under-handed, deceptive crap that has crept into so many areas of knowledge from the political world. Most people I know don't trust the mainstream media anymore and that ranges from people who are nearly communist in their left leanings to people who are practically John Birchers. Dispassioned, reasoned discussions are rare these days.
Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening? Why can't people who claim to operate on civilized values like reason sit down and have a friendly chat. "Interesting, Bjorn, let's look at your facts; Hmmm, interesting, but I don't think you considered the following (X, Y, Z); Touche, but I would like to present this, this and that to prove that global warming is not human-caused." Instead it's more like, "YOU MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE WHO ARE YOU TO QUESTION ANY ASPECT OF GLOBAL WARMING?!"
The truth is that there are so many people who are significantly maleducated today that it's no wonder why people are screwed up. I mean, it was a real eye opener for me, when I started reading up on my own time, about some of the cultural practices of the ancient world. Most of the people who look horrified at religion today have never even heard of such practices as Pater Familias nor know that their celtic ancestors (if that applies to them) often practiced human sacrifice. I honestly think that based on some of the conversations I have had since I started doing these things on my own, that the maleducation of the American public today is worse than the lack of education that existed 200 years ago. There is nothing worse than having a horrendously bad education--it'd be better to simply be a void that can be filled by actual knowledge.
Now, the reason that I brought up the global warming issue was not to beat a popular pinata, but to illustrate the fact that to many "laymen," the "experts" often come off as narrow-minded fanatics. That doesn't inspire confidence in the average person. What does inspire confidence is a calm ability to articulate on his or her level with facts that back it up. Problem is, too many people have an agenda and too many people are too caught up in it to be convincing to the majority who won't immediately accept what they say at face value as though it were penned by the hand of God.
Allow me for one to say that I am sick of the "Christians are anti-science" bullshit that the left loves to harp on while giving the environmental movement a free pass. You will notice, if you are honest, that the areas where even the most fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible conflict with modern scientific work are in areas that Christians have an **ethical** objection to the way that life is manipulated or ended or in how things came to be on some level. The environmental movement on the other hand is generally wildly antagonistic to everything from GM foods to many promising alternative energy sources to nanotechnology.
If there is any group that can be called anti-human, anti-science, it is the "true believer" segment of the environmental movement. No other politically active group is so thoroughly terrified of every promising area of research and development, so violent in opposing science (animal rights groups bombing research labs, for example) and so quick to limit the quality of life of the majority of the human race.
(3) CERTAIN USES OF COMPUTER SERVICES PROHIBITED.--Any person who knowingly utilizes a computer on-line service, Internet service, or local bulletin board service to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, or attempt to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, a child or another person believed by the person to be a child, to commit any illegal act described in chapter 794, relating to sexual battery; chapter 800, relating to lewdness and indecent exposure; or chapter 827, relating to child abuse, commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
Additionally, the court ruling states:
This case involves the prosecution of Michael John Simmons for luring or enticing a child by use of an online service in violation of section 847.0135, Florida Statutes (2002),
The fact of the matter is that the actual section of the law that he was being prosecuted under relates to the Internet in general. It could have been a series of windows messenger popup alerts and it still would have gone through under this statute because even that could technically count as an "online service."
I seriously doubt that the conviction would have been over-turned if the judge had defined email in a more limited fashion.
I understand the ideals behind the legislation, but let's think about this one for a second. Sure, people shouldn't be stopped due to arbitrary standards like race or gender from renting anywhere they want, but forcing a bigot to do it is not a good idea. Think about this one for a second, really well before responding. Does it make sense to order an adherent of white power or black panther ideology to rent to those they **hate**? Forcing people to do stuff like that has never worked well since the beginning of time.
But then, freedom of association is not valued by most Americans even though it is arguably one of the top few most precious natural rights a human being has and the most frequently violated by authoritarian states. I'm not even surprised, though, as many of the types who make support of the Civil Rights act almost like a religious mantra also tend to be the sort of people who support speech codes and free speech zones on college campuses.
Fucking pathetic that these sorts of people are allowed to be called "liberal" when in reality all they are is authoritarian.
I can't help but think that if copyrights were normalized to property rights conventions that FOSS would never have taken off. The problem with IP is that two people cannot equally own it. It's not possible for Microsoft to sell Windows the way that Dell can sell the hardware because if the user had a true property right in it, all hell would break loose for the copyright. This is why I think that the law needs to frame copyright holders' rights in terms of natural and common law rights. I think it's perfectly fair to legislate scarcity to protect copyright holders, but outlaw a presumption of implied contracts, EULAs, etc. with the exception of signed agreements between parties. Sometimes a little coercion is needed to restore balance, and though I vote libertarian, I am open to a little coercion in copyright law to give it the social legitimacy of physical property rights.
In fact, I think that is what will be needed if copyright is to truly mature. Just imagine if a software vendor had to relinquish control over its product the way any other retailer has to in the absence of a written agreement signed by two parties. It would actually present a bold new legitimacy for software copyrights, allowing them to attain the same legal standing as all other parts sold on the market.
When you see the title of this post and think "CCP--Central Committee of the Communist Party?" Then you see that there are two Cs and you feel a little sheepish...
Microsoft has just done the unthinkable: they have acknowledged some "social responsibility" to police themselves, genuflect before the Altar of Starving Musicians and Aggrieved Businessmen and generally do the bidding of another industry. It's as f$%^ing stupid as a gun manufacturer agreeing to whatever Handgun Control Inc wants in the name of "keeping guns out of criminals' hands."
Policing bad behavior is for the courts. People who make perfectly valid tools don't owe jack to those who are hurt by their misuse. Get a damn grip, Microsoft. You aren't hurting Apple's marketshare, you're hurting your lobbying efforts and things like that.
The United States. God bless our founding fathers for writing the first amendment so clearly. It makes targeting scoundrels that much easier. Anyone who gets fundamentally confused by it is either too stupid to function or evil. Makes fighting back a lot easier because unlike in Europe, if the day ever comes, patriots here could shoot the censors with a clear conscience.
We still have districts, which are arbitrary geographic regions often with little common interests. They're chopped up based on population, nothing more. That's how we have all of these little fiefdoms. The ultimate blow to incumbents would be when like-minded people could vote for any candidate in the state who represents them. When I lived in Virginia's 6th district, we had Congressman Goodlatte, the guy who drafted the gambling ban. The SOB did NOT represent me as a libertarian, conservative Christian or software developer, nor did he in practice represent most of his district. He was so unchallenged due to the fact that voters in his district could only choose him, rather than choose a better Virginia Republican or anyone else. I'd have voted for Wolf, the Republican up here in Northern Virginia over Goodlatte any day if given the chance!
So yes, we still have districts, still have usually only two "real choices" and we are to believe that "democracy is being saved." Bah. Few people really want to "save democracy." The changes are too extreme and most people in this country wouldn't understand them. Try getting one of those retards who couldn't handle the Florida ballots with their super-advanced hole punching mechanism to understand that they can now vote for any candidate in the entire state that they like. These are the people who can't understand the proper usage of a hole puncher.
A friggin hole puncher!
I'm sorry, I forgot. If you want to "save democracy," than add "disenfranchise the 'demagogue bait' voters" to the short list of things that must be done.
The UN which allows human rights abuses of the highest order to be involved in its human rights commission or the US which at least still has the 1st amendment and other rights on paper? Here's a thought for non-Americans who care about freedom of speech. You are probably a real minority. You want more, not less, American governance of the internet. The ideal solution for you would be total governance of the Internet by American jurisprudence. We have significantly higher standards for free speech rights than the rest of the world and when a foreigner comes to America, they even have officially all of the rights of a citizen WRT the courts. And those of you who want to bring up the MCA or other Bushisms, STFU. That has no relevance here. No court in America is going to allow Bush to hold you as an enemy combatant for suing him over Internet policy.
My government sucks. I'll be the first to say that about the US government, but it sucks a lot less than the EU, China or the UN.
The very fact that people think he has a chance, when these are some of the issues he's most passionate about, for a Senate seat against a guy like Hatch says how out ot touch many are. He'll get his ass kicked unless both Hatch and the Democrat get caught screwing little foreign toddlers on capitol hill while high on crack. If he cares about these issues, he needs to run with a firmly libertarian point of view and try to "out right wing" Hatch as a hawk, capitalist, family values guy patriot who thinks the government should mind its business. That's the only way he'll be able to even have a shot at putting his issues into a larger perspective that he can sell.
Ever heard of a letter of marque and reprisal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque)? Most Americans have no idea what it is, but it's a little power that Congress has that allows anyone they designate (and they could write it out to all of humanity) to hunt down and deal with (or bring back) an enemy of the US. Commonly used for pirates, the "terrorists of the 17th and 18th centuries," this little power would be wonderfully applicable today as it would allow private bounty hunters, Muslims looking to get rich, etc. to have a safe ticket to whacking anyone who crosses us.
But instead we have "professionals" like the former head of the FBI counter-terrorism group who had virtually no experience with fighting terrorism or counter-insurgency operations when he signed up. Yes, once again, a government monopoly on using force really helps.
Anyone want to bet that the ACLU would have gone nuts if Congress had issued a LMR for Bin Laden and any of his associates "dead or alive" on 9-11?
Many people already automatically trust the machine since "it's the machine." To them, it can only fail when it's broken, not be broken by design unless it's a home electronic device. Kiss your liberties goodbye. This will make the red light cameras look like nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
When you get a Top Secret clearance that is high enough to get you into real work on national security, you agree to submit anything you say about your job to government scrutiny and they, and their superiors, have veto authority. Period.
And get this... the first amendment doesn't cover classified information. You have no constitutional right to publish state secrets, and the US Constitution does not recognize "people power" no matter what some might like to think. It is fully legal for them to tell the NYT that if they know what's good for them, they'll censor a report that contains redacted information.
Oh and before anyone bitches, not just any information can be classified. You can get information legally declassified against the President's wishes if you can prove that it is not germane to national security. The law only allows classification of information related to national security, and that's not something the President is legally above reproach on.
They're winners, not losers like Netscape and to a lesser extent, Sun. They don't go running to big mama regulator to help them out from the mean old Microsoft bully. Instead they shrug stuff like this off and fight harder. That's why I expect them to be around in the next decade as a strong contender. They understand the rules of the marketplace, one of which is that it's easier to win if you focus on building a product rather than trying to sell a sob story to regulators about the unfairness of having to compete against bigger companies using their influence to attack you.
You have to give the MySQL guys credit for the fact that it is an incredibly easy product when it comes to configuring it for your needs. For me, out of college, going to Oracle was a culture shock because the process of configuring Oracle was so convoluted and drawn out for simple stuff. I know that Oracle and PostgreSQL can be much more powerful than MySQL, but there is something to be said for how easy it is for a developer to install MySQL and just start working with it.
It will cause a legal battle similar to the one over whether porn in the browser cache counts as possession. I predict that within a few years of this becoming law, some prosecutor will argue that you are responsible for the content that is moderated down by your spam filters. For those that don't know, in WordPress, Movable Type and probably others, spam is not by default automatically deleted. It's stored in the database with a flag on it that keeps it from being published when a page is sent. Why do I make this assumption? Because prosecutors are probably the ultimate assholes in law enforcement, who make a career often out of using every nook and cranny of a law to exact the maximum punishment they can get to advance their career.
But then, according to Wikipedia, it's not like most of the countries involved have any significant amount of the development costs at stake. The UK is the biggest contributor, and it foots only 10% of the bill. It's not cool, but it's to be expected. Hopefully these countries will learn to not invest money into American hardware except when they are buying it with the expectation that it is full featured.
Let's also be a little realistic here. No country with military hardware as advanced as the United States, Japan, Russia or Israel is going to play entirely fair when selling to other countries. No country wants to risk its prize weapon systems falling into unsavory hands when it's fully functional. Personally, I would be surprised if the MiGs that Russia sells to China and other countries are as kick ass as some of the stuff their own air force uses.
As I said a while ago, with hardware that low-powered, it becomes mostly a replacement for pen and paper, not something to use as a foundation for really teaching much cool stuff. The fact that it is also going to end up being an extremely expensive program doesn't surprise me either. $970 per kid is a lot for this thing no matter how you look at it. From an American POV, we'd call that a wasteful social program. To a third world country or one that is very much struggling to really become a first world country, it's a very, very expensive program to not do a pilot program.
You want to help the poor do cool things abroad? Follow Muhammad Yunus' example. His micro-credit system will probably do 20x more in the long run to raise the quality of life in the countries that follow his model than the OLPC could ever even dream of being part of.
When I have kids, I plan to tell that while it's technically not stealing, it's just plain dishonest. If a band, regardless of popular, has made music that they like and have copied, they owe the band a good faith effort to pay for the music. What's so hard about that? Even if you think it's not stealing, why is it so hard to say that you should compensate someone for making stuff you like? Don't even try the record label excuse because it actually does help a band out financially if you buy the CD since it helps them get out of debt. Since all of the bands I like are signed to a record label of some size, talk about not supporting the labels is for me, well, cheap.
Now if you want to nail the guy, you should get a reporter to ask him whether or not he classifies his kids' downloading as theft and if so, how does he feel as a father knowing that his kids are thieves. Let his own words save him or hang him high.
As for me, I have to snicker that an industry that has so thoroughly attacked Judao-Christian morality is finally reaping the socialist entitlement mentality whirlwind that it has sewn.
for leftists. Too busy fighting in the economy to get involved in any big way in politics. Then they provoked the ire of the Clinton Administration and well, Microsoft has discovered the joys of lobbying!
What's ironic about it is that Linux and OSX would still have enjoyed tremendous success if the antitrust case never happened. Both of those have gotten where they are squarely on technical and aesthetic grounds (both in the latter's case). The anti-trust case was nothing more than a few losers like Sun and Netscape whining and moaning about getting their asses kicked by Microsoft.
Now, congratulations, people. You've awakened a sleeping giant. How do you like them apples?
The baby boomers! The most self-absorbed generation of Americans who largely continue to live in denial about the fact that they are very close to being "senior citizens" instead of the "hip youth" they were back in the 60s and 70s!
Now all they have to do is whip out that credit card to get junior or little susie some new popularity! Or just get them some superficial attention from their friends. "Dude, how did that dork get with all of those hot chicks?!" Ah, more whitewashing of problems...
Government is not a well-oiled machine. It's a vast expanse of bureaucracy, backroom deals, corruption, coercion and many other things. So stop treating it like one and doing that feel good song and dance about "we the people are the government" as an excuse for letting it dictate standards, regulate all over the place, etc. This is the way that government works in practice. The more you invite it into your life, the more of this sort of villainy you will invite in general.
Increasingly people don't trust things that they aren't very familiar with because of the sort of political, under-handed, deceptive crap that has crept into so many areas of knowledge from the political world. Most people I know don't trust the mainstream media anymore and that ranges from people who are nearly communist in their left leanings to people who are practically John Birchers. Dispassioned, reasoned discussions are rare these days.
Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening? Why can't people who claim to operate on civilized values like reason sit down and have a friendly chat. "Interesting, Bjorn, let's look at your facts; Hmmm, interesting, but I don't think you considered the following (X, Y, Z); Touche, but I would like to present this, this and that to prove that global warming is not human-caused." Instead it's more like, "YOU MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE WHO ARE YOU TO QUESTION ANY ASPECT OF GLOBAL WARMING?!"
The truth is that there are so many people who are significantly maleducated today that it's no wonder why people are screwed up. I mean, it was a real eye opener for me, when I started reading up on my own time, about some of the cultural practices of the ancient world. Most of the people who look horrified at religion today have never even heard of such practices as Pater Familias nor know that their celtic ancestors (if that applies to them) often practiced human sacrifice. I honestly think that based on some of the conversations I have had since I started doing these things on my own, that the maleducation of the American public today is worse than the lack of education that existed 200 years ago. There is nothing worse than having a horrendously bad education--it'd be better to simply be a void that can be filled by actual knowledge.
Now, the reason that I brought up the global warming issue was not to beat a popular pinata, but to illustrate the fact that to many "laymen," the "experts" often come off as narrow-minded fanatics. That doesn't inspire confidence in the average person. What does inspire confidence is a calm ability to articulate on his or her level with facts that back it up. Problem is, too many people have an agenda and too many people are too caught up in it to be convincing to the majority who won't immediately accept what they say at face value as though it were penned by the hand of God.
Allow me for one to say that I am sick of the "Christians are anti-science" bullshit that the left loves to harp on while giving the environmental movement a free pass. You will notice, if you are honest, that the areas where even the most fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible conflict with modern scientific work are in areas that Christians have an **ethical** objection to the way that life is manipulated or ended or in how things came to be on some level. The environmental movement on the other hand is generally wildly antagonistic to everything from GM foods to many promising alternative energy sources to nanotechnology.
If there is any group that can be called anti-human, anti-science, it is the "true believer" segment of the environmental movement. No other politically active group is so thoroughly terrified of every promising area of research and development, so violent in opposing science (animal rights groups bombing research labs, for example) and so quick to limit the quality of life of the majority of the human race.
Additionally, the court ruling states:
Here's the link to the Florida Legal Code.
The fact of the matter is that the actual section of the law that he was being prosecuted under relates to the Internet in general. It could have been a series of windows messenger popup alerts and it still would have gone through under this statute because even that could technically count as an "online service."
I seriously doubt that the conviction would have been over-turned if the judge had defined email in a more limited fashion.
I understand the ideals behind the legislation, but let's think about this one for a second. Sure, people shouldn't be stopped due to arbitrary standards like race or gender from renting anywhere they want, but forcing a bigot to do it is not a good idea. Think about this one for a second, really well before responding. Does it make sense to order an adherent of white power or black panther ideology to rent to those they **hate**? Forcing people to do stuff like that has never worked well since the beginning of time.
But then, freedom of association is not valued by most Americans even though it is arguably one of the top few most precious natural rights a human being has and the most frequently violated by authoritarian states. I'm not even surprised, though, as many of the types who make support of the Civil Rights act almost like a religious mantra also tend to be the sort of people who support speech codes and free speech zones on college campuses.
Fucking pathetic that these sorts of people are allowed to be called "liberal" when in reality all they are is authoritarian.
All hell breaks loose for Novell, not OpenOffice. Presumably this is being done officially by them and so the blame would fall on Novell.
I can't help but think that if copyrights were normalized to property rights conventions that FOSS would never have taken off. The problem with IP is that two people cannot equally own it. It's not possible for Microsoft to sell Windows the way that Dell can sell the hardware because if the user had a true property right in it, all hell would break loose for the copyright. This is why I think that the law needs to frame copyright holders' rights in terms of natural and common law rights. I think it's perfectly fair to legislate scarcity to protect copyright holders, but outlaw a presumption of implied contracts, EULAs, etc. with the exception of signed agreements between parties. Sometimes a little coercion is needed to restore balance, and though I vote libertarian, I am open to a little coercion in copyright law to give it the social legitimacy of physical property rights.
In fact, I think that is what will be needed if copyright is to truly mature. Just imagine if a software vendor had to relinquish control over its product the way any other retailer has to in the absence of a written agreement signed by two parties. It would actually present a bold new legitimacy for software copyrights, allowing them to attain the same legal standing as all other parts sold on the market.
When you see the title of this post and think "CCP--Central Committee of the Communist Party?" Then you see that there are two Cs and you feel a little sheepish...
Microsoft has just done the unthinkable: they have acknowledged some "social responsibility" to police themselves, genuflect before the Altar of Starving Musicians and Aggrieved Businessmen and generally do the bidding of another industry. It's as f$%^ing stupid as a gun manufacturer agreeing to whatever Handgun Control Inc wants in the name of "keeping guns out of criminals' hands."
Policing bad behavior is for the courts. People who make perfectly valid tools don't owe jack to those who are hurt by their misuse. Get a damn grip, Microsoft. You aren't hurting Apple's marketshare, you're hurting your lobbying efforts and things like that.
The United States. God bless our founding fathers for writing the first amendment so clearly. It makes targeting scoundrels that much easier. Anyone who gets fundamentally confused by it is either too stupid to function or evil. Makes fighting back a lot easier because unlike in Europe, if the day ever comes, patriots here could shoot the censors with a clear conscience.
We still have districts, which are arbitrary geographic regions often with little common interests. They're chopped up based on population, nothing more. That's how we have all of these little fiefdoms. The ultimate blow to incumbents would be when like-minded people could vote for any candidate in the state who represents them. When I lived in Virginia's 6th district, we had Congressman Goodlatte, the guy who drafted the gambling ban. The SOB did NOT represent me as a libertarian, conservative Christian or software developer, nor did he in practice represent most of his district. He was so unchallenged due to the fact that voters in his district could only choose him, rather than choose a better Virginia Republican or anyone else. I'd have voted for Wolf, the Republican up here in Northern Virginia over Goodlatte any day if given the chance! So yes, we still have districts, still have usually only two "real choices" and we are to believe that "democracy is being saved." Bah. Few people really want to "save democracy." The changes are too extreme and most people in this country wouldn't understand them. Try getting one of those retards who couldn't handle the Florida ballots with their super-advanced hole punching mechanism to understand that they can now vote for any candidate in the entire state that they like. These are the people who can't understand the proper usage of a hole puncher. A friggin hole puncher! I'm sorry, I forgot. If you want to "save democracy," than add "disenfranchise the 'demagogue bait' voters" to the short list of things that must be done.
The UN which allows human rights abuses of the highest order to be involved in its human rights commission or the US which at least still has the 1st amendment and other rights on paper? Here's a thought for non-Americans who care about freedom of speech. You are probably a real minority. You want more, not less, American governance of the internet. The ideal solution for you would be total governance of the Internet by American jurisprudence. We have significantly higher standards for free speech rights than the rest of the world and when a foreigner comes to America, they even have officially all of the rights of a citizen WRT the courts. And those of you who want to bring up the MCA or other Bushisms, STFU. That has no relevance here. No court in America is going to allow Bush to hold you as an enemy combatant for suing him over Internet policy.
My government sucks. I'll be the first to say that about the US government, but it sucks a lot less than the EU, China or the UN.
The very fact that people think he has a chance, when these are some of the issues he's most passionate about, for a Senate seat against a guy like Hatch says how out ot touch many are. He'll get his ass kicked unless both Hatch and the Democrat get caught screwing little foreign toddlers on capitol hill while high on crack. If he cares about these issues, he needs to run with a firmly libertarian point of view and try to "out right wing" Hatch as a hawk, capitalist, family values guy patriot who thinks the government should mind its business. That's the only way he'll be able to even have a shot at putting his issues into a larger perspective that he can sell.
Ever heard of a letter of marque and reprisal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque)? Most Americans have no idea what it is, but it's a little power that Congress has that allows anyone they designate (and they could write it out to all of humanity) to hunt down and deal with (or bring back) an enemy of the US. Commonly used for pirates, the "terrorists of the 17th and 18th centuries," this little power would be wonderfully applicable today as it would allow private bounty hunters, Muslims looking to get rich, etc. to have a safe ticket to whacking anyone who crosses us.
But instead we have "professionals" like the former head of the FBI counter-terrorism group who had virtually no experience with fighting terrorism or counter-insurgency operations when he signed up. Yes, once again, a government monopoly on using force really helps.
Anyone want to bet that the ACLU would have gone nuts if Congress had issued a LMR for Bin Laden and any of his associates "dead or alive" on 9-11?
Many people already automatically trust the machine since "it's the machine." To them, it can only fail when it's broken, not be broken by design unless it's a home electronic device. Kiss your liberties goodbye. This will make the red light cameras look like nothing.