assumed year-round employment (which is probably more reasonable than you think) because I figured that there is a lot of off-year lobbying on Capital Hill
What the bill calls "Grassroots lobbying" has only marginal connection to "lobbying on Capitol Hill". It has to do with people putting out messages to "call your Congressman about...", which is sometimes genuine issue advocacy and, when it is, would follow the legislative calendar as it focuses on important decision points, but also very often used as a subtle (or not so subtle) campaign tactic to influence opinion on a particular issue that is related to a current campaign. Neither campaigns nor key points in the legislative calendar are really evenly distributed throughout the year, even though Congress is in session most of the year.
Wow, two of the three are factually wrong, and the third is spin.
An Astroturfer with 1 or more clients
I've always seen "astroturfing" used to refer to fake grassroots activity like LTTE's by shills pretending to be "concerned citizens"; while that may be a technique of advocacy used by those seeking to generate grassroots action, it is not coextensive with being a paid advocate of grassroots actions.
Reaching 500 people
No, you don't have to reach anyone, you have to direct your attempt to influence the public at more than 500 people. Whether you succeed in reaching that many people is irrelevant.
Being paid $100,000 a year
No, you don't have to be paid $100,000 in a year. You have to paid $25,000 in any quarter. You might notice that demand for public political advocacy is somewhat sporadic and seasonal, so the two are not equivalent.
If you are a candidate for office, I still cannot create a blog or run commercials about you in which I call you a child molester, unless it is true.
You seem to confusing American libel law with, maybe, British libel law. But you can say things that are not true about public figures in this country, so long as it is not done with "actual malice"—either actual knowledge of the falsity of the statement or reckless disregard to its truth or falsity. See New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).
Doesn't sound like treating bloggers as lobbyists, it sounds like treating lobbyists posing as bloggers as lobbyists.
Since it invented a whole new thing, "grassroots lobbyist", that has never been considered a "lobbyist" before, and is nothing at all like a lobbyist (i.e., someone who is paid to do direct advocacy of a policy position to a government official or body), it has nothing to do with treating "lobbyists", as that term is understand outside of the bills rewriting of the English language, as anything.
Its about treating paid public advocates of political positions and activity as if they were paid lobbyists.
What if the state claims that he was using their resources and knowledge about how ticket-system works?
Many public agencies, even without a software licensing agreement, require all employees to sign an agreement that government-provided computers will only be used for official business, often these aren't merely contracts, as the equivalent might be in private employment, but disclosures of criminal laws, for which criminal penalties apply for violation.
Additionally, while apparently he put lost of his own time into it, he apparently used was given time off other duties at public expense to work on it; most public agencies have policies against employees using public time for activities for private gain, as well, often backed by serious, sometimes criminal, penalties.
So, his claim is that he used paid time at public expense and public resources for private gain, and therefore he owns the source code. Maybe so, maybe so, but it seems to me he may be in a lose/lose position with that assertion.
Fine, ignore these two cases and just watch the news for a while. It is very clear that there is NO consistency or common-sense in sentencing in the U.S.
The news is selectively presented, by design, to highlight the shocking, unexpected, noteworthy, and unusual. It naturally greatly exaggerates the relative significance of inconsistencies and abnormalities; it also generally provides very little of the context that would explain why those unusual or shocking results occur.
Since your daughter in law is the woman married to your son, she is an adult
I believe that the age of consent for marriage (especially with parental consent) in many states is lower than the age of consent for sex with someone other than a spouse.
IIRC, the former is 12, or lower, in some states.
So it may be abstractly possible in extreme circumstances.
Treaties are above and outside of the Constitution.
Er, no, they aren't.
"The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution."Reid v. Covert, 354 US 1 (1957) at 5-6.
"It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights - let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition - to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.
There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. . . . This Court has also repeatedly taken the position that an Act of Congress, which must comply with the Constitution, is on a full parity with a treaty, and that when a statute which is subsequent in time is inconsistent with a treaty, the statute to the extent of conflict renders the treaty null. It would be completely anomalous to say that a treaty need not comply with the Constitution when such an agreement can be overridden by a statute that must conform to that instrument. " id, at 17.
He wouldn't have gotten 101 years if he had sent one spam email or even 100.
Also, he hasn't gotten anything like 101 years, and you can be fairly certain he won't get anything like 101 years, either.
The sum of the maximum sentence permitted in statute for each offense is not the same (or, generally, even remotely similar) to what someone is likely to be sentenced to for a series of offenses for which they are convicted.
So this guy is up for 101 years for spamming, but some dirt bag that molested his daughter-in-law for 6 years only serves a 4 year sentence.
Yeah, that makes all sorts of sense.
You're comparing the sum of all the maximum sentences for a bunch of offenses, on the one hand, to the actual sentence imposed, on the other. The maximum sentence for sexually abusing a young child even once in most states is something like 10-20 years; so even assuming it occurred only twice a year for six years, the maximum sentence would be far higher than that cited in this case.
In practice, though, sentences for multiple counts are rarely (and, in the federal system, there are sentencing guidelines that assure this is almost never the case) anything like the sum of the maximum sentence available for each of the offenses for which the defendant was convicted.
So, the problem you are seeing is because your comparison is completely invalid.
He did spam, but most of the years he got were for phishing, which is just fraud.
He hasn't gotten any years at all yet, he is due to be sentenced (per TFA) on June 11.
Since, almost certainly, the sentences will run mostly concurrently, it won't really be accurate to say that "most of the years he got" were for one thing or another, since they'll all be the same years.
Though the world of YouTube and podcasts seems like a place that 'requires' laws
Uhm, no, regular copyright laws cover it quite well. Specialized laws are not required. Particularly, the US effort to revive a dead treaty which would allow big corporate entities to rope off bits of the public domain simply becaue they used it is not necessary (and, anyway, something the US could not Constitutionally adhere to since it exceeds, quite clearly, the Constitutional power of the US government as regards IP, since it would extend IP rights to someone who is not the creator of work, and that do not arise because of a relationship with the creator.)
The user cares only for the document he sees in print or on screen. The internal structure of the file interests him not at all.
Actually, many users care about their ability to use the document, not just the appearance. Now, in the short-run, that means the applications that support it now; in the longer-run, though, the underlying format and its adaptability and limitations are a real-but-hidden issue that effects utility, though most users are not able to evaluate it directly.
Okay, so the FDA charges obscene amounts for clinical trials.
No, the FDA just requires that people conducting clinical trials do lots of things to establish effectiveness and safety, which things are expensive. Its not like you have to cut an $800 million check to the FDA.
If the FDA's approval process for new drugs is broken - fix it.
Its not broken (well, given the dangerous treatments that get through it, perhaps it is, but not in being to rigorous in its requirements.)
The problem is, demonstrating safety and effectiveness of a drug is a complicated, expensive procedure, and cutting corners on it kills people dead (so, unfortunately, does doing it right, but less so.) It is intrinsically expensive.
Patents are a way of providing an incentive for private actors to go through the bother necessary to do that. The alternative is a public system of evaluation and testing of drugs at public expense, but designing a system to do that effectively is nontrivial, too.
If the only people you can elect both agree on the key points what sort of choice is that?
There is an empirically demonstrated link between the number of viable parties in a democratic system and public satisfaction with government, for reasons which should be obvious: when you've only got two choices, you often have no substantive choice at all.
Its worth noting that the survey was of "executives"; their preferences may not translate to those of lower-level managers, and lots of people go for a substantial part of their career without reaching a position where an executive is dierctly involved in the career progress more than perhaps signing off a recommendation by a lower level manager.
And the positions where executives are more actively involved in personnel decisions are probably ones where having "face time" with a candidate is more relevant to assessing their ability. (Of course, they are also ones where people tend to be doing work that requires either travelling to meetings or receiving people who are travelling, so "telecommuting", per se, isn't often a practical option, anyway.)
This means that you can be paid for grass roots lobbying and not have to register if you have less than 500 readers, which actually protects your rights.
First of all, the idea of "grass roots lobbying" is a ludicrous idea invented to regulate as "lobbying" political advocacy of a type that is not at all what people are concerned about with "lobbying". Attempting to sway public opinion isn't "lobbying". Paid attempts to do it aren't "grass roots lobbying", they are political advertising.
And, no, having less than 500 readers make you safe. Its not the number that actually receive your message, but the number it is directed at. If you send personal email to less 500 people, you are probably safe. If you post something publicly on the web, its pretty easy to make the case that it is "directed at" the entire on-line population, not the number of people that actually choose to read it.
This only applies to astroturfing (which is manufactured grassroots action, paid for by a certain candidate).
Astroturfing usually, IME, refers to fake grassroots activity, like LTEs submitted by shills, advocacy groups with names that suggest they are citizens groups that are wholly funded by industry that they advocate on behalf of, etc.
Paid attempts to get people to engage in political activity, whether writing to a congressman or voting a particular way, aren't "astroturfing", but just garden-variety political advocacy. They also aren't what is normally understood by the term "lobbying".
Translation: If you want to be a lobbyist, you must follow the rules for being a lobbyist. If you're lobbying 500 or more people, you fit the description of a lobbyist no matter how you're do it.
Yes, politicians have decided to redefine lobbying to mean "attempting to persuade the public", so that the public anger which has focussed on actual lobbying activities—the corrupt relation between politicians and the paid political advocates that dole out favors and funnel campaign cash to politicians in exchange for control over policy—can be redirected to further squash advocacy in the public sphere of exactly the kind that brings official corruption to light and brings pressure to correct it, activitiy by groups seeking to inform and mobilize the public, rather than lobbying politicians.
No, you have fallen for a common misconception. While the kernel itself cannot be forked to v3, much of the code in the kernel is indeed licensed with the v2 or later clause and therefore can be used towards contributions to OpenSolaris under v3.
Such code would seem to be potentially problematic to start with, since if its in any way dependent on material (including interfaces) from the GPL v2-only kernel code, licensing under GPL v2 with the "or later" clause would seem to be a violation of the GPL v2-only license on the kernel itself.
OpenSolaris under v3 makes it easier for code to go from the Linux kernel to OpenSolaris and not vice versa, which is good for Sun.
Er, no. As long as the Linux kernel remains under GPLv2 without the "or any later version" clause, code from it cannot be taken by Sun and incorporated into a product offered under GPL v3. Neither, of course, could code be taken from OpenSolaris under GPL v3 and incorporated into the GPL v2 Linux kernel.
It wouldn't replace navies (you can't do really long-range — intercontinental — force projection or freedom of navigation operations with coastal railguns), OTOH, it would further restrict the utility of the (surface, at least) navies of the opponents of any nation that had these kind of weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, two of the three are factually wrong, and the third is spin.
I've always seen "astroturfing" used to refer to fake grassroots activity like LTTE's by shills pretending to be "concerned citizens"; while that may be a technique of advocacy used by those seeking to generate grassroots action, it is not coextensive with being a paid advocate of grassroots actions.
No, you don't have to reach anyone, you have to direct your attempt to influence the public at more than 500 people. Whether you succeed in reaching that many people is irrelevant.
No, you don't have to be paid $100,000 in a year. You have to paid $25,000 in any quarter. You might notice that demand for public political advocacy is somewhat sporadic and seasonal, so the two are not equivalent.
No, it says you must attempt to influence 500 or more people.
How many people you actually reach is not the standard that was in the bill.
$25,000 in any quarter; given that demand for paid political advocacy is rather seasonal, that is not the same as $100,000, even in a given year.
Since it invented a whole new thing, "grassroots lobbyist", that has never been considered a "lobbyist" before, and is nothing at all like a lobbyist (i.e., someone who is paid to do direct advocacy of a policy position to a government official or body), it has nothing to do with treating "lobbyists", as that term is understand outside of the bills rewriting of the English language, as anything.
Its about treating paid public advocates of political positions and activity as if they were paid lobbyists.
Many public agencies, even without a software licensing agreement, require all employees to sign an agreement that government-provided computers will only be used for official business, often these aren't merely contracts, as the equivalent might be in private employment, but disclosures of criminal laws, for which criminal penalties apply for violation.
Additionally, while apparently he put lost of his own time into it, he apparently used was given time off other duties at public expense to work on it; most public agencies have policies against employees using public time for activities for private gain, as well, often backed by serious, sometimes criminal, penalties.
So, his claim is that he used paid time at public expense and public resources for private gain, and therefore he owns the source code. Maybe so, maybe so, but it seems to me he may be in a lose/lose position with that assertion.
"Follow"? As if Microsoft is somehow the "leader", the first to make either
- commercial, for-pay software, or
- operating systems, or
- office suites
available for download?The news is selectively presented, by design, to highlight the shocking, unexpected, noteworthy, and unusual. It naturally greatly exaggerates the relative significance of inconsistencies and abnormalities; it also generally provides very little of the context that would explain why those unusual or shocking results occur.
I believe that the age of consent for marriage (especially with parental consent) in many states is lower than the age of consent for sex with someone other than a spouse.
IIRC, the former is 12, or lower, in some states.
So it may be abstractly possible in extreme circumstances.
Er, no, they aren't.
"The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution." Reid v. Covert, 354 US 1 (1957) at 5-6.
"It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights - let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition - to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.
There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.
.
.
.
This Court has also repeatedly taken the position that an Act of Congress, which must comply with the Constitution, is on a full parity with a treaty, and that when a statute which is subsequent in time is inconsistent with a treaty, the statute to the extent of conflict renders the treaty null. It would be completely anomalous to say that a treaty need not comply with the Constitution when such an agreement can be overridden by a statute that must conform to that instrument. " id, at 17.
You're comparing the sum of all the maximum sentences for a bunch of offenses, on the one hand, to the actual sentence imposed, on the other. The maximum sentence for sexually abusing a young child even once in most states is something like 10-20 years; so even assuming it occurred only twice a year for six years, the maximum sentence would be far higher than that cited in this case.
In practice, though, sentences for multiple counts are rarely (and, in the federal system, there are sentencing guidelines that assure this is almost never the case) anything like the sum of the maximum sentence available for each of the offenses for which the defendant was convicted.
So, the problem you are seeing is because your comparison is completely invalid.
He hasn't gotten any years at all yet, he is due to be sentenced (per TFA) on June 11.
Since, almost certainly, the sentences will run mostly concurrently, it won't really be accurate to say that "most of the years he got" were for one thing or another, since they'll all be the same years.
Uhm, no, regular copyright laws cover it quite well. Specialized laws are not required. Particularly, the US effort to revive a dead treaty which would allow big corporate entities to rope off bits of the public domain simply becaue they used it is not necessary (and, anyway, something the US could not Constitutionally adhere to since it exceeds, quite clearly, the Constitutional power of the US government as regards IP, since it would extend IP rights to someone who is not the creator of work, and that do not arise because of a relationship with the creator.)
Actually, many users care about their ability to use the document, not just the appearance. Now, in the short-run, that means the applications that support it now; in the longer-run, though, the underlying format and its adaptability and limitations are a real-but-hidden issue that effects utility, though most users are not able to evaluate it directly.
No, the FDA just requires that people conducting clinical trials do lots of things to establish effectiveness and safety, which things are expensive. Its not like you have to cut an $800 million check to the FDA.
Its not broken (well, given the dangerous treatments that get through it, perhaps it is, but not in being to rigorous in its requirements.)
The problem is, demonstrating safety and effectiveness of a drug is a complicated, expensive procedure, and cutting corners on it kills people dead (so, unfortunately, does doing it right, but less so.) It is intrinsically expensive.
Patents are a way of providing an incentive for private actors to go through the bother necessary to do that. The alternative is a public system of evaluation and testing of drugs at public expense, but designing a system to do that effectively is nontrivial, too.
There is an empirically demonstrated link between the number of viable parties in a democratic system and public satisfaction with government, for reasons which should be obvious: when you've only got two choices, you often have no substantive choice at all.
Its worth noting that the survey was of "executives"; their preferences may not translate to those of lower-level managers, and lots of people go for a substantial part of their career without reaching a position where an executive is dierctly involved in the career progress more than perhaps signing off a recommendation by a lower level manager.
And the positions where executives are more actively involved in personnel decisions are probably ones where having "face time" with a candidate is more relevant to assessing their ability. (Of course, they are also ones where people tend to be doing work that requires either travelling to meetings or receiving people who are travelling, so "telecommuting", per se, isn't often a practical option, anyway.)
First of all, the idea of "grass roots lobbying" is a ludicrous idea invented to regulate as "lobbying" political advocacy of a type that is not at all what people are concerned about with "lobbying". Attempting to sway public opinion isn't "lobbying". Paid attempts to do it aren't "grass roots lobbying", they are political advertising.
And, no, having less than 500 readers make you safe. Its not the number that actually receive your message, but the number it is directed at. If you send personal email to less 500 people, you are probably safe. If you post something publicly on the web, its pretty easy to make the case that it is "directed at" the entire on-line population, not the number of people that actually choose to read it.
Astroturfing usually, IME, refers to fake grassroots activity, like LTEs submitted by shills, advocacy groups with names that suggest they are citizens groups that are wholly funded by industry that they advocate on behalf of, etc.
Paid attempts to get people to engage in political activity, whether writing to a congressman or voting a particular way, aren't "astroturfing", but just garden-variety political advocacy. They also aren't what is normally understood by the term "lobbying".
Yes, politicians have decided to redefine lobbying to mean "attempting to persuade the public", so that the public anger which has focussed on actual lobbying activities—the corrupt relation between politicians and the paid political advocates that dole out favors and funnel campaign cash to politicians in exchange for control over policy—can be redirected to further squash advocacy in the public sphere of exactly the kind that brings official corruption to light and brings pressure to correct it, activitiy by groups seeking to inform and mobilize the public, rather than lobbying politicians.
Clever, that.
Such code would seem to be potentially problematic to start with, since if its in any way dependent on material (including interfaces) from the GPL v2-only kernel code, licensing under GPL v2 with the "or later" clause would seem to be a violation of the GPL v2-only license on the kernel itself.
Er, no. As long as the Linux kernel remains under GPLv2 without the "or any later version" clause, code from it cannot be taken by Sun and incorporated into a product offered under GPL v3. Neither, of course, could code be taken from OpenSolaris under GPL v3 and incorporated into the GPL v2 Linux kernel.
It wouldn't replace navies (you can't do really long-range — intercontinental — force projection or freedom of navigation operations with coastal railguns), OTOH, it would further restrict the utility of the (surface, at least) navies of the opponents of any nation that had these kind of weapons.