like.
Awesome and nauseating, all at the same time.
Category: Society Page 34 of 69
I am shocked the Lori Drew case actually went to trial – opening statements took place yesterday. I wrote about this case back in August:
The Lori Drew case is a case full of disgusting facts – appalling adult behavior (on all sides) contributed to circumstances that drove a young girl to suicide. One of those adults is now being prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for violating the MySpace.com terms of use agreement. That’s right, Federal prosecutors are trying to treat not complying with those ridiculous click-through agreements on nearly every web site you use as a crime. Thankfully not everyone is losing their mind over this (horrible) situation, and the EFF, Public Citizen, and others have stepped in with an amicus brief demonstrating just what a bad idea this is.
I haven’t followed things closely, but given what a stretch it is to apply the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to these facts, I assumed it was going to settle. Because truly, who would expect we were about to move into a world that made it a Federal crime to fill out a website user registration form with anything other than your true and personal information. And yet we’ll take a big step toward that being the case if Lori Drew is convicted. And with the facts being presented to the jury, I think that’s a very real possibility.
More background on the case itself here.
Not entirely sure what to think of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano at DHS, but knowing that she is generally smart on immigration and was instrumental in the effort to knock down the REAL ID Act is encouraging.
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Glad to know that even the President Elect shouldn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy with Verizon.
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A money bet against this not being executed well is probably a safe one.
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Iceland – a textbook case of the benefits of massive deregulation.
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More on this later, but in case that turns out to be a lot later, I wanted to highlight this good piece on managing current expectations by rewriting the past. The site, in general, is worth spending some time on.
Senator Russ Feingold kicks it off. Personally, I think we’ve reached a point where it is has been so abused as to merit a complete revisiting of it. At a minimum, it ought to be subject to a legislative override – perhaps by a supermajority. The exercise of the pardon should be an act of mercy, not a service to self and friends.
The New York Observer has an interesting few pages on CNN’s enormous spending on things that have very little, if anything, to do with actual newsgathering or analysis. And it reminds me that I can’t remember the last time I watched CNN or turned to CNN.com for actual news. I’m sure I’ve tuned into it to catch a live feed, but that was probably more a function of being the next channel in the progression than anything else.  To be sure, CNN has a greater actual capacity to do original reporting around the planet than most any other organization I can think of. Yet for all of that reach, they manage to filter it in such a way that it’s about a half inch deep by the time it hits your screen.  Their solution to that? Will.i.am fake holograms and prettier graphics.
I know Andrew Sullivan isn’t the best source to go to for HRC criticism, but he poses an excellent question – where was the HRC on Prop 8?
Seeing things like this pushback on the BS that is asset forfeiture does my heart good. It’s just a little diary on dKos, to be sure, but it demonstrates an awareness by very partisan Dems that not everything the Democratic Party has backed is good. These next four to eight years should not only be about correcting Republican mistakes, but also Democratic ones. Whether the elected Democrats like it or not.
Reason Magazine has an interesting look at Tor Books, one of the most successful publishers of science fiction in the past 25 years (I have shelves and shelves full of nothing but Tor and Baen books). The author, naturally, takes a particular interest in how Tor’s books have furthered an openness toward the libertarian political philosophy. The piece makes a number of observations that go well beyond that, though:
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the goateed and bespectacled Tor eminence who edited two of the house’s Prometheus finalists this year, draws a direct line between youthfulness and openness to libertarian ideas. “Young people read fiction to figure out how the world works,†he says, “and science fiction is an extremely effective, quick way of testing your views of how the world works.†Paraphrasing the late novelist and critic Thomas Disch, Hayden says, “Enormous quantities of science fiction and fantasy are about power, and who needs power fantasies more than teenagers, people who have a little bit of power for the first time in their lives and need to think about how power works?â€
Oh, how true that is.
Why aren’t we taxing these scams, again?