Health care cannot be a right, and I honestly cannot conceive of the twisted thinking that gives rise to such an idea. If health care is a guaranteed right, then you are essentially advocating slavery for health care providers.
In the same way that saying "voting is a right" is advocating slavery for poll workers, or saying "access to counsel in criminal cases is a right" (hello, Amendment VI) is advocating slavery for lawyers.
And, for all those democrats who think this is a bad decision, let's turn this around: do you think it would be reasonable for the government to force you to buy a gun every year?
"Unreasonable" in policy terms? Sure. Requiring a new purchase every year would clearly make little policy sense. Unconstitutional? No. And you don't even need to look to the Commerce Clause on that one, as Congress has a much more specific express authority to use in that case, the Art. I, Sec. 8 power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia."
It's the exact same thing.
No, its a very different thing. But I'll agree that they are similarly situated with regard to constitutionality.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary.
That the federal judiciary is empowered to resolve controversies arising under the Constitution is explicit in Article III.
A case addressing whether or not a particular Act of Congress is within the authority granted to Congress in the Constitution is clearly one "arising under the Constitution".
Its hard to imnagine how the Constitution could be more explicit about this. You can't resolve cases arising under the Constitution if you can't apply the Constitution to the particular facts, and you can't resolve cases arising under federal law if you can't resolve apparent conflicts between federal laws, including apparent conflicts between mere statutes and the Constitution, to determine what the applicable law is.
You only need "a proper mouse and a proper keyboard" if you need a PC and this isn't a PC at all.
I need a proper keyboard to do substantial document editing, email, etc., all of which can, via various web apps (many of which are Google web apps), be done on this device, without a PC-style OS.
So, no, its not at all true that needing a keyboard to get the best use of a device also means needing all the things that a PC-style OS like Ubuntu/Windows/OSX has that this doesn't.
You can use a "proper keyboard" with an iPad if you like and I do if I have a lot of typing to do and I'm not using my PC.
Sure, you can buy an add-on keyboard to use with an iPad, at which point you've turned it into a very expensive netbook with a smaller screen than a Cr-48. Unless the Cr-48 is at least twice as expensive as you'd expect given its apparent hardware specs, the iPad isn't going to be price competitive.
The problem with the laptop form factor - though it's fine for PCs - is that it is more prone to damage and is less "portable" than a pad form factor.
Sure, if you mostly use your device for things for which you don't want a keyboard, a netbook is less portable than an iPad. If you mostly use it for tasks that do work best with a physical keyboard, the clamshell is much more convenient -- both to carry and to set up -- than a tablet + separate keyboard + stand that will hold the device at a convenient angle for using a keyboard.
You don't have to have a lap or a table or be sitting down.
I don't need that for my existing 11.6" netbook, since its pretty much the perfect size to hold open in my left hand and use the keyboard or trackpad with my right. Though, sure, if I had to use a computing device a lot when I was standing up, I'd prefer a tablet -- probably a smaller one than an iPad -- or a smartphone.
So, tell me why this device is better than a PC type laptop or an iPad type device?
It'll be better than a laptop/netbook running a full PC-style OS for many users because it is simpler to use in practice.
It'll be better than an iPad for many users because it has a keyboard.
It'll be better than an iPad for many users because it will likely be substantially less expensive.
For some users, the iPad will be better. For some users, a traditional laptop will be better. For some users, something else will be better.
If you don't need the power of a full PC (including netbooks) why would you want this instead of an iPad?
Because it has a built-in keyboard, and your usage is typing heavy?
Because, judging by prices of netbooks with comparable hardware that include a non-zero additional cost for Windows, the likely retail price for a 3G-enabled ChromeOS netbook equipped similarly to the Cr-48 is significantly lower than the cost of the iPad?
Because it has a bigger screen than an iPad?
Because -- by the time the retail version is available -- you can directly attach USB devices, unlike the iPad?
It has the disadvantages of a laptop (e.g. form factor) and none of the advantages.
Several of the advantages of laptops over tablets relate to the form factor -- the keyboard, for one thing.
Seriously, of course Drudge wouldn't have a DMCA process; it's not applicable in cases where the publisher is exercising editorial control over the contents.
Its possible this particular claim was put into the lawsuit to pre-empt any potential invocation of the DMCA Safe Harbor by Drudge. While you know, and I know, that Drudge isn't a host of user-posted, unedited, content, you don't rely on common knowledge in a lawsuit if you want to win.
If I am not mistaken, the DMCA is still the applicable piece of legislation. Just not the part of the DMCA that you’re thinking of.
I'm pretty sure you are mistaken. Now, there is lots of stuff in the DMCA, so maybe I'm missing something, but this is clearly outside of the safe harbor for service providers, and clearly completely unrelated to the anti-circumvention provisions, so what relevance do you think DMCA has?
1. The WWW is supra-national. 2. Its defining technical standards (adherence to them), and common conventional use of those standards in the contrstruction of and participation in the world wide web constitute the basis of a global-in-scope COMMON LAW that should be given serious weight in adjudications of such matters by lower (narrower than global in scope) courts.
There may be such an argument, but you haven't made it, and it seems to be pretty unlikely that such an argument would succeed in US courts. Starting with the fact that US courts don't recognize any kind of supra-national "common law" to start with. There is some recognition of "customary international law" as itself being available in U.S. courts which derives from the common law (which is not itself supra-national), but for something to be "customary international law" it must both be in general practice and generally accepted in the international community as law. This is clearly not the case of IETF and W3C standards for the web.
Go ahead. Try to build a power plant in California. I'll be back in 20 years to see if you succeeded
There wasn't a ban as part of (or concurrent with) deregulations. There were very few applications and no approvals of permits for new plants for a number of years before deregulation, though several permits were issued after deregulation and before the peak of the crisis.
And, while this may have been -- while not a ban -- a bad thing for other reasons, it wasn't the source of the crisis: there was never a real shortage of supply, their were deliberately engineered carefully arranged delivery cutbacks or oversubscription of power lines by suppliers that wanted to make it impossible for other people to supply power to increase spot prices.
Don't you remember when Governor Terminator was fined like $18,000 for trying to use alternative fuel?
Even if that is an accurate portrayal of a real event that isn't omitting key information (which I doubt) it has no relevance to the claim that California banned new powerplant construction as part of, or even around the time of, the "deregulation" process for electricity.
I understand that the Cr-48 costs $450. Too expensive in my opinion. I am afraid that at this price, Google's product could be Dead on Arrival.
The Cr-48 is an unbranded testing device; its cost to the only people who can get them from Google is $0.
The actual costs of retail Chrome OS-based netbooks, which a couple of manufacturers have announced will be making and selling under their own branding, are not yet known, but I'd be very surprised (given existing netbooks and the fact that Chrome OS isn't going to need much in terms of hefty hardware) if the initial models were anywhere close to $450. I'd more expect the low-end of the initial range of products to be around $250 or lower.
Why on Earth do people care about this thing? You've got a big community that used to be mostly Open-Source advocates
And a demonstration device running what is mostly (entirely?) an open source OS (Chromium OS is open source, not sure if Chrome OS has closed components -- I thoght Flash was, but the popular Chromium OS builds apparently have "full Flash support", so unless they've replaced the built in support with something else...)
I think I might detect a connection...
and you can't even install software on this darn netbook.
Most people who are not lawyers themselves look at the spirit of the law, which is definitely to criminalize failure to get insurance.
No, the intent is to recover the costs imposed on the system by people who fail to get insurance, which is the domain of civil, not criminal, law. Some -- but not most -- people who are not lawyers confuse "illegal" and "criminal", though the latter is a rather small subset of the former.
Right now the only penalty for failing to buy health care is a tax.
No, its a fine.
If it was a tax that was reduced if you got health insurance: say, if the fine that they give you if you don't get health insurance was instead a capitation (head tax) assessed on the states in at a flat amount per person, and the feds provided an individual refundable income tax credit in the same amount as the per capita tax that was available to anyone who chose to get health insurance, the essential effect would be similar (especially if the State followed up and implemented tax policy which mirrored the federal capitation with a direct State tax), but the particular Constitutional argument against the mandate would rendered irrelevant.
So, let me get this straight: the government can force me to have auto insurance, but not health insurance? Well that sure makes sense.
Your confusion rests on equivocation -- a use of the same word with two different meanings. "The government" that forces you to have auto insurance is your state government, which has what are known as "general police powers", which means every power not specifically denied to it by the federal Constitution.
The government which (this judge has ruled) cannot force you to buy health insurance is the federal government, which has only those powers provided to it by the federal Constitution. Even if the conditions and products were identical, there are things the federal government can't do that States can (and vice versa, as many of the powers denied to the States in the federal Constitution are reserved for the federal government alone.)
I agree that it's not a surprise. However, I don't know what your source is on the "forum-shopping" thing. As far as I know, the individual mandate has been challenged in courts around the country.
Its been challenged in several courts, yes. This particular court is one of two (the other is, IIRC, in Florida) where there have been wide reports that the people filing the particular challenges filed in those courts had actively selected the particular forums from among those available to them to be friendly to the cause, and that they were the most likely both to rule in favor of the opponents of reform and to, in so doing, also issue the orders sought to immediately halt implementation.
Yeah, the DMCA “takedown notice” is a method of dealing with an independent content host. But under the DMCA you can also send a cease-and-desist notice to the infringing party personally.
You can always (the DMCA has nothing to do with this) send a cease-and-desist notice to someone who you believe is violating your legal rights. This is typically done when you believe that the probability and result of resolving the issue via a cease-and-desist is worth the additional delay it imposes over filing suit immediately.
(A cease-and-desist, if you are lucky, gets the offender to stop further violation of your rights.)
But that's a far cry for your claim in GGP that "The DMCA is clear-cut about how to handle infringement"; the DMCA does not provide a mandatory process that applies to alleged direct violators analogous to the takedown notice process in the safe harbor provision that applies to innocent hosts of user-placed infringing content.
No but they could give authoritative guidance to the courts about what the assumed intent is when one is publishing content on a publicly accessible portion of the world wide web.
No, they can't provide authoritative guidance to courts on presumed intent.
Presumed intent, where that matters in a legal case, a question on which some of the content of standards documents might in some cases have some persuasive weight, they certainly would not be "authoritative" on the question of presumed intent.
If you want to change the law, you need to deal with the entities empowered to make and change laws.
They can state that there exists a legal entity called the "World Wide Web"
They can state anything they want, but legal entities are either natural persons or creatures of law (e.g., juridical entities like nations, subordinate government entities, and corporations chartered by nations or subordinate government entities.)
Statements by standards bodies are not the mechanisms by which actual legal entities are created.
In a surprise move, US District Judge Henry E. Hudson issued a ruling today that the universal healthcare law that was pushed through by the Obama administration is unconstitutional.
How is it a surprise that one of the two judges in the various challenges to the law that have been widely been reported as conservative judges that opponents of the law have been very careful in forum-shopping to get their cases before because they are likely to be sympathetic on this particular argument -- that the individual mandate exceeds the Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause -- has ruled that (surprise?) the individual mandate exceeds the Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause.
Especially given that the judges leanings on this issue were heavily telegraphed in the hearings and earlier preliminary rulings in the case, calling it a "surprise" defies reason.
I'll admit I don't know anything about Righthaven, had to look them up, but I'm wondering why they would ask for (or have any hope of getting) control of the web site?
Righthaven always asks for that in their suits; AFAIK, every one of them has been settled without going to trial. Whether they could get it is debatable; I would assume their basis for asking is a rather expansive interpretation of the forfeiture provisions in copyright law. Until there's a case that firmly says they don't extend that far, they might as well shoot for the moon.
The DMCA is clear-cut about how to handle infringement. A company that side-steps the normal DMCA takedown process (which might have to be snail-mailed – that’s not quick enough for them though!) should have no right to straight away sue the infringing party.
That's not what the DMCA says.
The DMCA provides a takedown process that is directed at innocent service providers hosting information provided independently by users, and creates a safe harbor for the service provider only (so long as the service provider complies with the specific requirements of the safe harbor provision.)
The DMCA does not limit the ability of the rights-holder to file suit directly against the infringing user, nor do the limitations on liability under the safe harbor provision apply at all to sites where: 1. The service provider, without acting expeditiously to remove infringing material, has either actual knowledge that the activity or material is infringing, or awareness of facts or circumstances from which the infringement is apparent, or 2. Receives a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity.
A rights-holder can certainly can file a suit against the allegedly infringing user, or against a site operator alleging any of the circumstances which put the operator outside of the safe harbor, without filing a DMCA takedown notice first.
I wonder if the Drudge report just linked to the image.
No, they posted the photograph with their story as an "illustration".
The HTML spec and or http spec should make it clear (are they even licensed?) that it is always de-facto legal to create a link (anywhere) to content that has been published and is publicly accessible on the world wide web, so long as the content is legal to view.
Neither IETF nor W3C have any authority to dictate what is legal and what is not legal.
ctrl+f "DMCA" in that article doesn't find anything.
Then you are looking at the wrong linked article. If you read the one linked from the sentence in TFS about the DMCA ("Righthaven also takes issue with the fact that the Drudge Report has no DMCA takedown regime to respond to those who allege violations of copyright") surprisingly enough contains the exact sentence that is in TFS.
Has this Righthaven organization heard of the DMCA
Since their lawsuit includes complaints about Drudge Report not following the DMCA process, I'd say that it seems that they have heard of the DMCA.
Also why do all these business and services feel the need to "push" their information or services upon people ? The more they do this the more people start feeling drowned.
Google's value proposition to users is providing information. The less work that users have to put in to get the information they want, the better Google is serving them.
It only feels like being drowned if its the wrong information.
California deregulated how much you could charge for wholesale electricity. While locking how much you could charge consumers. While banning any new power plants. Hmmm What could go wrong?
This is false in several respects, and misleading in areas where it isn't outright false.
First, the deregulation affected not only the wholesale end but also the retail side (which is why alternative retail suppliers emerged under deregulation in areas that were formerly single-utility monopolies.)
Second, California didn't ban new power plants.
And, finally, the problems that did emerge weren't primarily related to any gap between wholesale and retail regulations (the primary problem wasn't that retail sellers got squeezed), it was that available capacity was deliberately shut-off at peak demand period by generators to cause artificial shortages (and that distributors like Enron caused artificial congestion and shortages by other means, such as by deliberately reserving capacity on key lines and then not supplying power.) The incentive to do that would have been exactly the same had there been simple pass-through pricing of minute-to-minute wholesale price fluctuations to consumers (in fact, the earliest symptoms of the problem that caused the first state complaints to FERC, the federal commission responsible for overseeing interstate energy transmission, were retail price increases in 2000 in San Diego, an area of the State where retail prices did follow the increases in wholesale costs.
To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies.
No, it wouldn't.
"The US" is not "US companies". The US can have a hard time doing something that would be easy for US companies to do if they were inclined to simply because the US does very little to make US companies want to do that thing.
Slashdot Mirror
In the same way that saying "voting is a right" is advocating slavery for poll workers, or saying "access to counsel in criminal cases is a right" (hello, Amendment VI) is advocating slavery for lawyers.
"Unreasonable" in policy terms? Sure. Requiring a new purchase every year would clearly make little policy sense. Unconstitutional? No. And you don't even need to look to the Commerce Clause on that one, as Congress has a much more specific express authority to use in that case, the Art. I, Sec. 8 power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia."
No, its a very different thing. But I'll agree that they are similarly situated with regard to constitutionality.
That the federal judiciary is empowered to resolve controversies arising under the Constitution is explicit in Article III.
A case addressing whether or not a particular Act of Congress is within the authority granted to Congress in the Constitution is clearly one "arising under the Constitution".
Its hard to imnagine how the Constitution could be more explicit about this. You can't resolve cases arising under the Constitution if you can't apply the Constitution to the particular facts, and you can't resolve cases arising under federal law if you can't resolve apparent conflicts between federal laws, including apparent conflicts between mere statutes and the Constitution, to determine what the applicable law is.
I need a proper keyboard to do substantial document editing, email, etc., all of which can, via various web apps (many of which are Google web apps), be done on this device, without a PC-style OS.
So, no, its not at all true that needing a keyboard to get the best use of a device also means needing all the things that a PC-style OS like Ubuntu/Windows/OSX has that this doesn't.
Sure, you can buy an add-on keyboard to use with an iPad, at which point you've turned it into a very expensive netbook with a smaller screen than a Cr-48. Unless the Cr-48 is at least twice as expensive as you'd expect given its apparent hardware specs, the iPad isn't going to be price competitive.
Sure, if you mostly use your device for things for which you don't want a keyboard, a netbook is less portable than an iPad. If you mostly use it for tasks that do work best with a physical keyboard, the clamshell is much more convenient -- both to carry and to set up -- than a tablet + separate keyboard + stand that will hold the device at a convenient angle for using a keyboard.
I don't need that for my existing 11.6" netbook, since its pretty much the perfect size to hold open in my left hand and use the keyboard or trackpad with my right. Though, sure, if I had to use a computing device a lot when I was standing up, I'd prefer a tablet -- probably a smaller one than an iPad -- or a smartphone.
It'll be better than a laptop/netbook running a full PC-style OS for many users because it is simpler to use in practice.
It'll be better than an iPad for many users because it has a keyboard.
It'll be better than an iPad for many users because it will likely be substantially less expensive.
For some users, the iPad will be better. For some users, a traditional laptop will be better. For some users, something else will be better.
Because it has a built-in keyboard, and your usage is typing heavy?
Because, judging by prices of netbooks with comparable hardware that include a non-zero additional cost for Windows, the likely retail price for a 3G-enabled ChromeOS netbook equipped similarly to the Cr-48 is significantly lower than the cost of the iPad?
Because it has a bigger screen than an iPad?
Because -- by the time the retail version is available -- you can directly attach USB devices, unlike the iPad?
Several of the advantages of laptops over tablets relate to the form factor -- the keyboard, for one thing.
Probably not.
True, but I don't think you'll find any applicable provision of law requiring a C&D before filing a lawsuit over the offenses alleged in this case.
Its possible this particular claim was put into the lawsuit to pre-empt any potential invocation of the DMCA Safe Harbor by Drudge. While you know, and I know, that Drudge isn't a host of user-posted, unedited, content, you don't rely on common knowledge in a lawsuit if you want to win.
I'm pretty sure you are mistaken. Now, there is lots of stuff in the DMCA, so maybe I'm missing something, but this is clearly outside of the safe harbor for service providers, and clearly completely unrelated to the anti-circumvention provisions, so what relevance do you think DMCA has?
There may be such an argument, but you haven't made it, and it seems to be pretty unlikely that such an argument would succeed in US courts. Starting with the fact that US courts don't recognize any kind of supra-national "common law" to start with. There is some recognition of "customary international law" as itself being available in U.S. courts which derives from the common law (which is not itself supra-national), but for something to be "customary international law" it must both be in general practice and generally accepted in the international community as law. This is clearly not the case of IETF and W3C standards for the web.
There wasn't a ban as part of (or concurrent with) deregulations. There were very few applications and no approvals of permits for new plants for a number of years before deregulation, though several permits were issued after deregulation and before the peak of the crisis.
And, while this may have been -- while not a ban -- a bad thing for other reasons, it wasn't the source of the crisis: there was never a real shortage of supply, their were deliberately engineered carefully arranged delivery cutbacks or oversubscription of power lines by suppliers that wanted to make it impossible for other people to supply power to increase spot prices.
Even if that is an accurate portrayal of a real event that isn't omitting key information (which I doubt) it has no relevance to the claim that California banned new powerplant construction as part of, or even around the time of, the "deregulation" process for electricity.
The Cr-48 is an unbranded testing device; its cost to the only people who can get them from Google is $0.
The actual costs of retail Chrome OS-based netbooks, which a couple of manufacturers have announced will be making and selling under their own branding, are not yet known, but I'd be very surprised (given existing netbooks and the fact that Chrome OS isn't going to need much in terms of hefty hardware) if the initial models were anywhere close to $450. I'd more expect the low-end of the initial range of products to be around $250 or lower.
And a demonstration device running what is mostly (entirely?) an open source OS (Chromium OS is open source, not sure if Chrome OS has closed components -- I thoght Flash was, but the popular Chromium OS builds apparently have "full Flash support", so unless they've replaced the built in support with something else...)
I think I might detect a connection...
So?
Most people who are not lawyers themselves look at the spirit of the law, which is definitely to criminalize failure to get insurance.
No, the intent is to recover the costs imposed on the system by people who fail to get insurance, which is the domain of civil, not criminal, law. Some -- but not most -- people who are not lawyers confuse "illegal" and "criminal", though the latter is a rather small subset of the former.
Right now the only penalty for failing to buy health care is a tax.
No, its a fine.
If it was a tax that was reduced if you got health insurance: say, if the fine that they give you if you don't get health insurance was instead a capitation (head tax) assessed on the states in at a flat amount per person, and the feds provided an individual refundable income tax credit in the same amount as the per capita tax that was available to anyone who chose to get health insurance, the essential effect would be similar (especially if the State followed up and implemented tax policy which mirrored the federal capitation with a direct State tax), but the particular Constitutional argument against the mandate would rendered irrelevant.
Your confusion rests on equivocation -- a use of the same word with two different meanings. "The government" that forces you to have auto insurance is your state government, which has what are known as "general police powers", which means every power not specifically denied to it by the federal Constitution.
The government which (this judge has ruled) cannot force you to buy health insurance is the federal government, which has only those powers provided to it by the federal Constitution. Even if the conditions and products were identical, there are things the federal government can't do that States can (and vice versa, as many of the powers denied to the States in the federal Constitution are reserved for the federal government alone.)
Its been challenged in several courts, yes. This particular court is one of two (the other is, IIRC, in Florida) where there have been wide reports that the people filing the particular challenges filed in those courts had actively selected the particular forums from among those available to them to be friendly to the cause, and that they were the most likely both to rule in favor of the opponents of reform and to, in so doing, also issue the orders sought to immediately halt implementation.
You can always (the DMCA has nothing to do with this) send a cease-and-desist notice to someone who you believe is violating your legal rights. This is typically done when you believe that the probability and result of resolving the issue via a cease-and-desist is worth the additional delay it imposes over filing suit immediately.
(A cease-and-desist, if you are lucky, gets the offender to stop further violation of your rights.)
But that's a far cry for your claim in GGP that "The DMCA is clear-cut about how to handle infringement"; the DMCA does not provide a mandatory process that applies to alleged direct violators analogous to the takedown notice process in the safe harbor provision that applies to innocent hosts of user-placed infringing content.
No, they can't provide authoritative guidance to courts on presumed intent.
Presumed intent, where that matters in a legal case, a question on which some of the content of standards documents might in some cases have some persuasive weight, they certainly would not be "authoritative" on the question of presumed intent.
If you want to change the law, you need to deal with the entities empowered to make and change laws.
They can state anything they want, but legal entities are either natural persons or creatures of law (e.g., juridical entities like nations, subordinate government entities, and corporations chartered by nations or subordinate government entities.)
Statements by standards bodies are not the mechanisms by which actual legal entities are created.
How is it a surprise that one of the two judges in the various challenges to the law that have been widely been reported as conservative judges that opponents of the law have been very careful in forum-shopping to get their cases before because they are likely to be sympathetic on this particular argument -- that the individual mandate exceeds the Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause -- has ruled that (surprise?) the individual mandate exceeds the Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause.
Especially given that the judges leanings on this issue were heavily telegraphed in the hearings and earlier preliminary rulings in the case, calling it a "surprise" defies reason.
Righthaven always asks for that in their suits; AFAIK, every one of them has been settled without going to trial. Whether they could get it is debatable; I would assume their basis for asking is a rather expansive interpretation of the forfeiture provisions in copyright law. Until there's a case that firmly says they don't extend that far, they might as well shoot for the moon.
That's not what the DMCA says.
The DMCA provides a takedown process that is directed at innocent service providers hosting information provided independently by users, and creates a safe harbor for the service provider only (so long as the service provider complies with the specific requirements of the safe harbor provision.)
The DMCA does not limit the ability of the rights-holder to file suit directly against the infringing user, nor do the limitations on liability under the safe harbor provision apply at all to sites where:
1. The service provider, without acting expeditiously to remove infringing material, has either actual knowledge that the activity or material is infringing, or awareness of facts or circumstances from which the infringement is apparent, or
2. Receives a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity.
A rights-holder can certainly can file a suit against the allegedly infringing user, or against a site operator alleging any of the circumstances which put the operator outside of the safe harbor, without filing a DMCA takedown notice first.
No, they posted the photograph with their story as an "illustration".
Neither IETF nor W3C have any authority to dictate what is legal and what is not legal.
Then you are looking at the wrong linked article. If you read the one linked from the sentence in TFS about the DMCA ("Righthaven also takes issue with the fact that the Drudge Report has no DMCA takedown regime to respond to those who allege violations of copyright") surprisingly enough contains the exact sentence that is in TFS.
Since their lawsuit includes complaints about Drudge Report not following the DMCA process, I'd say that it seems that they have heard of the DMCA.
Google's value proposition to users is providing information. The less work that users have to put in to get the information they want, the better Google is serving them.
It only feels like being drowned if its the wrong information.
This is false in several respects, and misleading in areas where it isn't outright false.
First, the deregulation affected not only the wholesale end but also the retail side (which is why alternative retail suppliers emerged under deregulation in areas that were formerly single-utility monopolies.)
Second, California didn't ban new power plants.
And, finally, the problems that did emerge weren't primarily related to any gap between wholesale and retail regulations (the primary problem wasn't that retail sellers got squeezed), it was that available capacity was deliberately shut-off at peak demand period by generators to cause artificial shortages (and that distributors like Enron caused artificial congestion and shortages by other means, such as by deliberately reserving capacity on key lines and then not supplying power.) The incentive to do that would have been exactly the same had there been simple pass-through pricing of minute-to-minute wholesale price fluctuations to consumers (in fact, the earliest symptoms of the problem that caused the first state complaints to FERC, the federal commission responsible for overseeing interstate energy transmission, were retail price increases in 2000 in San Diego, an area of the State where retail prices did follow the increases in wholesale costs.
No, it wouldn't.
"The US" is not "US companies". The US can have a hard time doing something that would be easy for US companies to do if they were inclined to simply because the US does very little to make US companies want to do that thing.