I would think Gates' actions would qualify as criminal assault: intentionally putting people in fear of physical harm. As you describe his action, you think he should "knock people on their asses" to make them "know fear." It's as though he'd been talking about AIDS and then hurled a bunch of (clean) needles into the audience. Do people here think he didn't break the law, or that he's above it?
Rather than handing tax money to failing corporations that then hand out huge bonuses to executives, how about letting failing companies die, cutting corporate tax rates, ending corporate subsidies and tax penalties alike, and trying something more like a free market than we have today? I keep hearing that "unfettered capitalism" is the problem, when "more fetters" really doesn't sound like a good idea. I'm against the kind of "free market" where the government confiscates a large share of all the wealth and redistributes it while presuming to "manage the economy!"
Because we've accepted that politicians have a right to take as much of our property as they feel necessary, never mind the Constitution. In contrast, we've convinced ourselves that corporate executives have no right to the wealth they create because they're greedy, exploitative, making too much money, &c. Never mind that "corporations" includes mom & pop businesses as well as the world's Wal-Marts. "Fair is foul and foul is fair."
I visited the local Barnes & Noble the other night, and browsed the fantasy/SF section. Although I didn't search exhaustively, I didn't notice even one book that was not standard fantasy, urban fantasy, far-future SF with spaceships, stellar empires and the like, and/or a series like "Warhammer 40K" or "WarCraft." I eventually walked through the aisle with eyes closed to randomly poke books for inspection.
*poke* "Alice returned to New Orleans to find that Hurricane Katrina had decimated the vampire clans!" *poke* "In the 27th century, the Spiky Planet Empire is ruled by the eternal Clone Master!" *poke* "R.A. Salvatore. Enough said."
I'm mainly interested in writing about the near future, partly because I see the space-empire kind of future as closed off to us unless some very exciting things happen in the near future. So why do most people seem more interested in fantasy or far-future SF? Escapism?
What legal authority would you invoke for all that use of force? I notice that this plan involves not just forcing corporations into things, but even state and local governments.
I ask more than that: I ask that the Constitution be upheld. There is no authority in it for such things as building broadband Net hardware. (And no, the Founders said it would be absurd to claim "general welfare" an unlimited spending power.) If we've really twisted our most basic laws so badly as to justify this, then we have no rights that can't be taken from us "legally."
Obama & Co. aren't going to restore the Constitution, though. Far from it. Their stated intention is to increase government's size and power. Obama's inaugural speech said that we should not even be asking whether government is too large. His chief of staff has openly called for slavery -- forced labor by young people -- and Congress has been threatening to re-impose the "Fairness Doctrine." Obama & Co. also support a Constitutional interpretation such that government has no limits, thanks to abuse of the interstate commerce clause.
If you want to protect the Constitution, start by acknowledging that both parties are guilty and that both conservative and liberal programs are far outside government's legal authority.
Spending for the "general welfare" is not a power of Congress. See James Madison, Federalist #41, in which he explained that only someone paranoid of the new Constitution would claim that it'd ever be twisted into meaning that.
Pretty good analysis. He could legally do many of those things, though not all, as it's not his place to create or overturn Congressional legislation already passed.
Unfortunately for us, neither he nor Congress intends to uphold the Constitution in terms of heeding the limits of federal power. If he's at least a mediocre president he won't go substantially farther in that violation than Bush or Clinton or their predecessors did. What should we do, though, if he does something thoroughly and blatantly unconstitutional?
It's not only a matter of our government spending far more than it has when it's already in astonishingly deep debt. The federal government is also spending far outside its actual legal authority, as laid out in the Constitution. There is nothing in there justifying Broadband Net access as a federal spending item. Nor health care, nor pensions... I'm hoping that some good will come of the ongoing economic troubles in that people will start to realize their politicians are not just irresponsible but criminal.
As part of the hype, one article a while ago showed off such a photo... which was actually a normal photo of a tank, badly Photoshopped to make it look like it was fading to invisibility at one end. That kind of nonsense highlights the level of hype about this project.
/Why is it I'm never allows to decide what's good for myself? Why do I need it decided for me?/
For basic philosophical reasons. This problem runs deeper than which party is in power today. Unlike the authors of the American Constitution, modern politicians (and much of the voting public) believe that you are a weak and helpless being who needs to be protected for your own good. Supposedly, you do not have the right to make your own decisions, but you do have the right to force others to take care of you by giving you food, housing, education, medical care, and so on. In other words, you're a baby or a pet to them, not a free adult. Until the public understands this nasty implication of the welfare state, it's going to keep voting itself into oblivion.
(Incidentally, have you been hearing the phrase "It is what it is" as often as I have lately? It's eerily like "Who is John Galt?".)
I graduated from MIT and loved it, but have been questioning how much it was really worth. One thing that the Institute didn't do for me was kick my tail when I decided to major in a humanities subject, thus making my degree useless. I was too ignorant to understand that this was a mistake, and was mainly thinking that I didn't want to end up as Dilbert. Innovations like MIT's OpenCourseWare project and a shift in class sizes may be useful, but they don't address the question of whether students are learning anything useful for their tuition.
Freedom is destroyed. As for taxation not being stealing, doesn't that depend on what authority is being used to justify it? I mean, if I grab your wallet and say "Tax!" that doesn't make it okay; nor does a democratic vote just because it's democratic. That's why we have so much sympathy for Robin Hood, whose victims were English feudal noblemen -- basically a protection racket.
You're comparing the BRCA-screened kid with electronic medical records? Although they're both new technologies in the field of medicine, there's an important difference. Nobody's forcing you to interact with the kid. You will be forced to participate in a record system, with all the invasion of privacy and other problems that implies.
In other words, the BRCA thing isn't 1984. You want Brave New World down the street. 8)
(Disclaimer: I don't actually oppose the BRCA screening as "Brave New World" at all.)
I agree with the idea that maybe there'll be less alleged need for full government control over health care if we standardize our record-keeping system. But the Obama proposal is itself a piece of increased government control. He hasn't got the constitutional authority to say to the medical industry, "you're hereby ordered to use the following technology," even if it'd be a good idea for them to use it. I'd be in favor of the industry getting together and developing a standard, but not their being ordered to develop or implement one.
Seriously. My first encounter with the game was a demo in a game store, where I was walking around a beach and eventually fighting a T-rex. At first I thought it was neat that my party members could automatically heal each other and so on... but then I realized they were doing fine against the dino, and that no further input was required from me. I stepped back from the controller and watched. Later, I bought the game, but got bored of it a few hours through.
Good point. One of the reasons that legalese developed as it did is supposedly the "confusion of tongues" brought on by the Norman Conquest. The early English language had many overlapping, near-synonymous terms, so for completeness the early English legal documents contained phrases like "give, devise and bequeath." But the Romans had a well-developed legal system much earlier, and Latin is known for its excruciating precision.
As for legalese being like programming, there are standard clauses ("boilerplate") and entire form documents that even professional lawyers use. This recycling isn't just laziness on their part; it's the equivalent of using unit-tested code. If Clause X has held up in court for the last hundred years, why change it and risk breaking something, despite the fact that it looks overly complicated? In fact, if you do use nonstandard language and you're a professional lawyer, a court might well assume that you meant the wording to have a different effect than the standard version.
I've been told by a lawyer, repeatedly, in nearly these words, that "creating ambiguity is our job." That's only on the offensive side though; it's when writing a contract or something that ancient, crufty code is useful.
About natural-language programming: Some game-creation kits like the "RPG Maker" series do this graphically rather than in words, and really, high-level programming languages and even graphical OSes do this. It's just not an obvious shift. Same deal with AI: the technology is advancing, but because much of the improvement is in subtle, unobtrusive things, it's not astonishing.
Wealth comes up because it's a proxy for freedom. The people demanding heavy government control over our lives have in some cases seized on global warming as an excuse for taking more power over us. It so happens that their proposed methods focus on confiscating and redistributing wealth, so the debate is superficially about money. Because of this attack on our freedom in the name of saving the planet/climate/polar bears, some of us have become skeptical (rightly or not) even of the scientific case that something must be done.
To carry the farming analogy further, did crop rotation take hold because some medieval Albertus Gore convinced the world's kings to force their farmers to do things his way?
Their version is much more recent. If we were to write the US Constitution today... well, I would want to avoid that, because we'd probably make it as long as the proposed EU Constitution, and as hostile to freedom.
The "breaking" part doesn't necessarily mean actual breakage of property. The idea is more like "opening," so that you'd be breaking-and-entering if you snuck into a house by opening an unlocked window. There are a lot of surprising points like that in the law, eg. "burglary" in some cases is defined as only happening at night. I think it was also Massachusetts that once had trouble building a womens' dorm because a law defined a building with N women and no men as a brothel!
The relevance to this hacking case (er, "cracking" as MIT students put it) is that our legal system is still struggling to categorize the things you can do with computers. Even in this thread there're people saying "What they did was like breaking into a house! No, it was like inspecting public property! No, it was..."
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I would think Gates' actions would qualify as criminal assault: intentionally putting people in fear of physical harm. As you describe his action, you think he should "knock people on their asses" to make them "know fear." It's as though he'd been talking about AIDS and then hurled a bunch of (clean) needles into the audience. Do people here think he didn't break the law, or that he's above it?
Rather than handing tax money to failing corporations that then hand out huge bonuses to executives, how about letting failing companies die, cutting corporate tax rates, ending corporate subsidies and tax penalties alike, and trying something more like a free market than we have today? I keep hearing that "unfettered capitalism" is the problem, when "more fetters" really doesn't sound like a good idea. I'm against the kind of "free market" where the government confiscates a large share of all the wealth and redistributes it while presuming to "manage the economy!"
Because we've accepted that politicians have a right to take as much of our property as they feel necessary, never mind the Constitution. In contrast, we've convinced ourselves that corporate executives have no right to the wealth they create because they're greedy, exploitative, making too much money, &c. Never mind that "corporations" includes mom & pop businesses as well as the world's Wal-Marts. "Fair is foul and foul is fair."
I visited the local Barnes & Noble the other night, and browsed the fantasy/SF section. Although I didn't search exhaustively, I didn't notice even one book that was not standard fantasy, urban fantasy, far-future SF with spaceships, stellar empires and the like, and/or a series like "Warhammer 40K" or "WarCraft." I eventually walked through the aisle with eyes closed to randomly poke books for inspection.
*poke* "Alice returned to New Orleans to find that Hurricane Katrina had decimated the vampire clans!" *poke* "In the 27th century, the Spiky Planet Empire is ruled by the eternal Clone Master!" *poke* "R.A. Salvatore. Enough said."
I'm mainly interested in writing about the near future, partly because I see the space-empire kind of future as closed off to us unless some very exciting things happen in the near future. So why do most people seem more interested in fantasy or far-future SF? Escapism?
What legal authority would you invoke for all that use of force? I notice that this plan involves not just forcing corporations into things, but even state and local governments.
I ask more than that: I ask that the Constitution be upheld. There is no authority in it for such things as building broadband Net hardware. (And no, the Founders said it would be absurd to claim "general welfare" an unlimited spending power.) If we've really twisted our most basic laws so badly as to justify this, then we have no rights that can't be taken from us "legally."
The most logical structure for telecom networks is to have the government own the physical infrastructure...
There's no legal authority for that, at least on the federal level.
Obama & Co. aren't going to restore the Constitution, though. Far from it. Their stated intention is to increase government's size and power. Obama's inaugural speech said that we should not even be asking whether government is too large. His chief of staff has openly called for slavery -- forced labor by young people -- and Congress has been threatening to re-impose the "Fairness Doctrine." Obama & Co. also support a Constitutional interpretation such that government has no limits, thanks to abuse of the interstate commerce clause.
If you want to protect the Constitution, start by acknowledging that both parties are guilty and that both conservative and liberal programs are far outside government's legal authority.
Spending for the "general welfare" is not a power of Congress. See James Madison, Federalist #41, in which he explained that only someone paranoid of the new Constitution would claim that it'd ever be twisted into meaning that.
Pretty good analysis. He could legally do many of those things, though not all, as it's not his place to create or overturn Congressional legislation already passed.
Unfortunately for us, neither he nor Congress intends to uphold the Constitution in terms of heeding the limits of federal power. If he's at least a mediocre president he won't go substantially farther in that violation than Bush or Clinton or their predecessors did. What should we do, though, if he does something thoroughly and blatantly unconstitutional?
It's not only a matter of our government spending far more than it has when it's already in astonishingly deep debt. The federal government is also spending far outside its actual legal authority, as laid out in the Constitution. There is nothing in there justifying Broadband Net access as a federal spending item. Nor health care, nor pensions... I'm hoping that some good will come of the ongoing economic troubles in that people will start to realize their politicians are not just irresponsible but criminal.
Has DARPA announced any plan for a follow-up to its Grand Challenge contest -- the one with the simulated city driving course?
As part of the hype, one article a while ago showed off such a photo... which was actually a normal photo of a tank, badly Photoshopped to make it look like it was fading to invisibility at one end. That kind of nonsense highlights the level of hype about this project.
/Why is it I'm never allows to decide what's good for myself? Why do I need it decided for me?/
For basic philosophical reasons. This problem runs deeper than which party is in power today. Unlike the authors of the American Constitution, modern politicians (and much of the voting public) believe that you are a weak and helpless being who needs to be protected for your own good. Supposedly, you do not have the right to make your own decisions, but you do have the right to force others to take care of you by giving you food, housing, education, medical care, and so on. In other words, you're a baby or a pet to them, not a free adult. Until the public understands this nasty implication of the welfare state, it's going to keep voting itself into oblivion.
(Incidentally, have you been hearing the phrase "It is what it is" as often as I have lately? It's eerily like "Who is John Galt?".)
I graduated from MIT and loved it, but have been questioning how much it was really worth. One thing that the Institute didn't do for me was kick my tail when I decided to major in a humanities subject, thus making my degree useless. I was too ignorant to understand that this was a mistake, and was mainly thinking that I didn't want to end up as Dilbert. Innovations like MIT's OpenCourseWare project and a shift in class sizes may be useful, but they don't address the question of whether students are learning anything useful for their tuition.
Freedom is destroyed. As for taxation not being stealing, doesn't that depend on what authority is being used to justify it? I mean, if I grab your wallet and say "Tax!" that doesn't make it okay; nor does a democratic vote just because it's democratic. That's why we have so much sympathy for Robin Hood, whose victims were English feudal noblemen -- basically a protection racket.
You're comparing the BRCA-screened kid with electronic medical records? Although they're both new technologies in the field of medicine, there's an important difference. Nobody's forcing you to interact with the kid. You will be forced to participate in a record system, with all the invasion of privacy and other problems that implies.
In other words, the BRCA thing isn't 1984. You want Brave New World down the street. 8)
(Disclaimer: I don't actually oppose the BRCA screening as "Brave New World" at all.)
I agree with the idea that maybe there'll be less alleged need for full government control over health care if we standardize our record-keeping system. But the Obama proposal is itself a piece of increased government control. He hasn't got the constitutional authority to say to the medical industry, "you're hereby ordered to use the following technology," even if it'd be a good idea for them to use it. I'd be in favor of the industry getting together and developing a standard, but not their being ordered to develop or implement one.
You should be asking not why the industry isn't doing it, but why the government didn't step in a long time ago, to do this and a lot more.
Because there's no legal authority for the (federal) government to do so.
Seriously. My first encounter with the game was a demo in a game store, where I was walking around a beach and eventually fighting a T-rex. At first I thought it was neat that my party members could automatically heal each other and so on... but then I realized they were doing fine against the dino, and that no further input was required from me. I stepped back from the controller and watched. Later, I bought the game, but got bored of it a few hours through.
Hey, what about "Progress Quest?"
Had, not "has." Neither US party upholds the Constitution except in a very loose sense.
Good point. One of the reasons that legalese developed as it did is supposedly the "confusion of tongues" brought on by the Norman Conquest. The early English language had many overlapping, near-synonymous terms, so for completeness the early English legal documents contained phrases like "give, devise and bequeath." But the Romans had a well-developed legal system much earlier, and Latin is known for its excruciating precision.
As for legalese being like programming, there are standard clauses ("boilerplate") and entire form documents that even professional lawyers use. This recycling isn't just laziness on their part; it's the equivalent of using unit-tested code. If Clause X has held up in court for the last hundred years, why change it and risk breaking something, despite the fact that it looks overly complicated? In fact, if you do use nonstandard language and you're a professional lawyer, a court might well assume that you meant the wording to have a different effect than the standard version.
I've been told by a lawyer, repeatedly, in nearly these words, that "creating ambiguity is our job." That's only on the offensive side though; it's when writing a contract or something that ancient, crufty code is useful.
About natural-language programming: Some game-creation kits like the "RPG Maker" series do this graphically rather than in words, and really, high-level programming languages and even graphical OSes do this. It's just not an obvious shift. Same deal with AI: the technology is advancing, but because much of the improvement is in subtle, unobtrusive things, it's not astonishing.
Wealth comes up because it's a proxy for freedom. The people demanding heavy government control over our lives have in some cases seized on global warming as an excuse for taking more power over us. It so happens that their proposed methods focus on confiscating and redistributing wealth, so the debate is superficially about money. Because of this attack on our freedom in the name of saving the planet/climate/polar bears, some of us have become skeptical (rightly or not) even of the scientific case that something must be done.
To carry the farming analogy further, did crop rotation take hold because some medieval Albertus Gore convinced the world's kings to force their farmers to do things his way?
Their version is much more recent. If we were to write the US Constitution today... well, I would want to avoid that, because we'd probably make it as long as the proposed EU Constitution, and as hostile to freedom.
The "breaking" part doesn't necessarily mean actual breakage of property. The idea is more like "opening," so that you'd be breaking-and-entering if you snuck into a house by opening an unlocked window. There are a lot of surprising points like that in the law, eg. "burglary" in some cases is defined as only happening at night. I think it was also Massachusetts that once had trouble building a womens' dorm because a law defined a building with N women and no men as a brothel!
The relevance to this hacking case (er, "cracking" as MIT students put it) is that our legal system is still struggling to categorize the things you can do with computers. Even in this thread there're people saying "What they did was like breaking into a house! No, it was like inspecting public property! No, it was..."