This sets a terrible precedent. If a UK citizen can be extradited to the US because of the content of their web pages hosted in the UK, why wouldn’t US citizens be able to be extradited to Thailand on charges of disrespecting the king or to China for undermining the government by being critical of it? To even press this case at all shows either a fundamental undervaluing of the freedom of speech of everyone, including US citizens, or, more likely, a belief in the most fundamental of American hypocrisies: the idea that the rules that the US applies to the rest of the world shouldn’t be applied to the US.
I voted for Obama, but when he says “Let us be clear”, you know some bullshit is coming.
While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response.
We fully support the censorship of the internet, which baffles and scares us. However, this single step may have been too drastic. Please allow us some time to find stepping stones.
Happiness comes from the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. We’ve been told time and again to keep finding the first. Our schools helped developed the second. It’s time we put more thought on the third.
What big problems are you trying to solve?
Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: “Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet.”…
My other objective was to find out the position held by the average constituent who supports PIPA. It was my impression that PIPA was mostly written by well-funded lobbyists and that there aren’t that many Joe Six-Packs who truly support it. But surely they must be out there! So I asked him this specifically. He said: “I haven’t spoken to any consituents who support it.” He clarified that he couldn’t articulate what the average constituent supporter thinks because he hasn’t spoken with any.
A few months later, guess what happened? Thanks to the Google/Verizon alliance on the matter, the FCC decided the compromised vision of Net Neutrality was just fine also. To be clear: Net Neutrality was thrown out in the wireless space because Google sided with Verizon’s ridiculous and horribly conflicted stance on the matter.
The open spectrum enemy, turned Net Neutrality enemy, became Google’s bedmate thanks to a business deal. Straight up. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
We got all of this thanks to Google’s desire for Android to take over the world. I commented earlier that they signed a deal with the devil — I wasn’t being facetious. They actually did! And they got away with it!
I think about these things everyday that I see positive news about Android. It’s so wonderful that the platform which helped cripple Net Neutrality and is keeping the evil carriers in control is taking off. Make no mistake: Android is now the carriers’ best friend.
Why I Hate Android - MG Siegler
The whole thing reminds me of our discussion of the two modes of pop-economics reasoning. You take some fact (or stylized fact) about the world, and then you either (1) use people-are-rational-and-who-are-we-to-judge-others reasoning to explain why some weird-looking behavior is in fact rational, or (2) use technocratic reasoning to argue that some seemingly reasonable behavior is, in fact, inefficient.
While the Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety and supply of the drugs, which are sold both as generics and under brand names like Ritalin and Adderall, the Drug Enforcement Administration sets manufacturing quotas that are designed to control supplies and thwart abuse. Every year, the D.E.A. accepts applications from manufacturers to make the drugs, analyzes how much was sold the previous year and then allots portions of the expected demand to various companies.
How each manufacturer divides its quota among its own A.D.H.D. medicines — preparing some as high-priced brands and others as cheaper generics — is left up to the company.
Now, multiple manufacturers have announced that their medicines are in short supply. The F.D.A. has included these pills on its official shortages list, as has the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which tracks the problem for hospitals. And the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has told the more than 8,000 doctors in its membership that shortages seem to be “widespread across a number of states” and are “devastating” for children.
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F.D.A. Finds Short Supply of Attention Deficit Drugs - Gardiner Harris
The DEA sets production quotas for ADD drugs. Predictably, this results in people not getting the drugs they want, despite there being no shortage of capacity to make the drugs.
It is a major shortcoming of US democracy that I cannot effectively vote against policies like this.
both Elsevier and Macmillan (parent company of Nature Publishing Group) were listed as supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act.
So all I know is what I saw. As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. After the proceedings this morning, I’m left with little of the former, and a whole lot of the latter two.
The known knowns: the scrum of lawyers, defense and prosecution, addressed the judge. I saw the judge speak to the lawyers. Then I saw our attorneys return to their bench, closer to where I was sitting, out of earshot of the sidebar. But the ADA stayed with the judge. He spoke to her, with his back to the courtroom, for about ten minutes. Our attorneys didn’t get to hear what he said to her, didn’t have a chance to respond to whatever the government was saying about our client, about the case. It was frankly shocking.
After those ten minutes of secret government-judge conversation, our attorneys were invited back to the sidebar, whereupon the scrum of lawyers spoke with the judge for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they dispersed. The judge uttered not one word to the open court. And that was it.
Stunned, I followed a group of reporters outside and listened as Attorney Krupp attempted to answer their questions. It was then I realized that the judge had impounded all the court records related to the case, and mandated complete secrecy governing the proceedings. The public wasn’t even to know whether our motion to quash had been approved or denied.
The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen, who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda, which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment;
It did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of), based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone, and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone, and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny;
Although don’t worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first; and this is the “most transparent administration ever”; currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Enterprise software companies are competing with consumer software products that sell to end enterprise users. And they’re far less agile; plenty of enterprise products have user interfaces five to ten years behind the interfaces of free or very cheap competitors. (One infamous Oracle product has an interface where the “Next” button is labeled “Back to Summary.”) Traditional due diligence won’t work when big decisions get made at the bottom of the org chart, not the top.
Norway got rich through the discovery of offshore oil and gas reserves, a bonanza of natural resource wealth. But with such wealth can come problems, most notably the so-called “Dutch Disease” that afflicted the Netherlands after its own fossil-fuel find.* A capital-intensive industry that employs relatively few workers became a major export industry. The high volume of natural resource exports pushes up the value of the currency and makes it cheap to buy products from abroad. This, in turn, tends to put all domestic producers of other tradable goods out of business and leave your economy dangerously dependent on the fluctuations of the commodity markets.
In principle, economic orthodoxy would say not to sweat it. Just use the natural resources to generate government revenue, then engage in massive redistribution. To many, though, there’s something depressing about the idea of a whole nation living on the dole. What’s more, many Persian Gulf states who’ve de facto taken this approach have realized over time that it creates problems. Your country is rich, superficially, but it lacks the human capital and organizational skills typical of a modern developed country. When the oil runs out, what will you be left with?
Protecting select product markets from international competition has, for this reason, played a major role in Norwegian economic strategy. The inefficiencies involved in blocking foreign butter are minor at most times, can be relaxed in an emergency, and preserve some kind of non-oil economic base for the future.
There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything. This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this.
When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it. As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.
