Not weighing on death penalty but the narrow scope of your statement.

Your statement seems to lead that there is only one govt. That's the fallacy. There are municipalities (cities, townships, maybe even county) govt, then there's state govt., and finally the federal govt.

When people complain about Big Government, they are talking about the federal level. Why would someone want the size of government to be small at the top (federal level)? Because we have the least amount of say at that level, and it has the most reaching effects. The lower you go, the more influence you have. Therefor the thinking is the more power over your lives they should have. Of course conversely, the lower levels of government also effects less and less people.

You might have heard a saying at one point in time, "The states are experiments in democracy." That was supposed to because the people had a fairly good say in what the state did and didn't do (it's a lot easier to petition a government when you need a lot less number of signatures on a petition) and other states can look at it and say "Hey that went pretty well. Maybe I can implement something like that for my people." or "Well that didn't work out very well, guess we won't be going down that road." You have more control (notice I said more, not total control) over what effects you and what works for you (after all the different areas of the country have different needs) and if someone in a different area of the country wants something that ends up being a bad idea, you're not effected.

Death penalty is handled as a state level. The the federal government shouldn't come into play unless they want to take it away from the states to decide for themselves and make it a federal penalty. So yes, you can still believe in a small government at the federal level and still support the death penalty at the state level.

The article reads... The functionality of the default behavior of the middle mouse button will be for context menus. That reads to me that it'll still be customized to be what ever you want it to be.

After all isn't that what drew us to Unix environments in the first place? You don't like something, change it yourself. Shells that first allowed you to embed commands right into the prompt itself, window managers that allowed you to update the look and feel of your windows, including animated fire in the title bars. With a text editor and a config file you could do anything.

And in the end. If it doesn't give you the ability to change the behavior, it's not like there isn't 500 bazillion other window managers out there.

I agree with you that there's a difference, but...

I'm reminded of a story I heard somewhere (book, movie, sorry can't remember) were some people were on their way to work and they where discussing the fact that if they were late the punishment was death. Somewhere along the way they were delayed and were going to be late for their work and one guy asks another one what is the punishment for revolting, and the answer was death. So faced with the same punishment if they revolted or late for work and they were already late for work, they decided to revolt instead.

While the current punishment for piracy isn't death, it's the same if you pirate a movie that would of been in the public domain vs. something that is current and wouldn't be in the public domain; then to the pirate, what is the difference?

Of course to the pirate, nothing, but if the purpose of the piracy is civil disobedience (which the OP was talking about and you responding to) then it does matter because it would be to express the idea that Copyright is broken.

For me, the reason there wasn't a language course was because each one of those classes used a different language. By the end of the degree program the people will have forgotten more languages than most others will ever know.

But the upside is that I can, with a straight face, say I am a programmer and not a coder. The language is no longer important, it's just an implementation of the program. I can move (and have moved) from projects that use Ada to C to C++, Assembly, Snowball, COBAL, etc... with little trouble other than keeping the projects themselves straight in my head. Picking up the language of the day ends up being trivial.

Some can say that it also leads to someone that is a jack of all trades with being a master of none, but isn't necessarily true, as you will find that you do tend to lean towards 1 or 2 languages that you like and you really learn the ins and outs of them.

The OP was stating that just because the federal govt. passed a law means the States had to accept it, because of the Supremacy clause. I was saying it's a grey area because of the perceived abuse of the Commerce clause, that any law is allowed to be passed because it relates to Commerce.

I succeed to your point, that Congress can in fact impose Law on the manner of States holding Congressional elections, which would in turn trump any state law. The Presidential election is described in Article Two, in which he's elected by Electors and it explicitly states that it's entirely under the jurisdiction of the states;

I still succeed your point though, since the Congressional election and the elector/presidential elections happens at the same place and time, Congress can pass a law the state will have to uphold.

You and me both!

1. Absolutely, but if the Constitution explicitly states that the manner in which elections are held are controlled by the States themselves, then how can the Supremacy Clause come into play?
2. I've have never read that a Treaty trumps federal law. I'm not saying it doesn't, but it doesn't make sense and the Supremacy Clause states who wins out between a conflict in the local state and elsewhere. But it does go back to point number one in that a court case states that a treaty can not convey powers to the federal govt. that the Constitution doesn't already give it. So if the Constitution says that the federal govt. can't tell the state how to handle it's election, a treaty signed by the federal govt. can't either.

And now, that's a grey area. The Constitution states that the federal govt. is not able to pass any law that is not enumerated to them via the Constitution. That is why the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (a.k.a. Obamacare) could not be legal in any circumstances unless it was declared a tax (which the justice dept. lawyers did argue). So if the Constitution states that the state has control over their own election, then not even the federal govt. can interfere with it.

I call it a grey area because it seems that, lately, everything is related to the Commerce clause. Initially the legality of the individual mandate of the PPACA (forcing every citizen to purchase health insurance) was argued to fall under the Commerce clause, but the Supreme Court threw that out and draw a line stating that the federal govt. can not force a citizen into Commerce in order to regulate it.

A treaty allowing for non-authorized observers to be near a polling station, can not be argued to fall under the Commerce clause.

IANAConstitutionalL, but I'll play one on slashdot.

With having said that I'll say, then the agreement is illegal

The Constitution states that the states, that make up the country, have control on how elections are handled, except for a few details such as dictating when the elections can happen, but for the most part every state has control over how they handle elections. For the federal govt. to enter in an agreement that defines any procured or policy not dictated by the Constitution is effectively void and cannot be enforced.

Now one might argue that the U.S. Attorney General is going after states that pass voter ID law, and if the states can pass whatever election law they want it and trump the federal govt., how can he do that? He is able to have that right because of the 24th Amendment which states; that no one, not even the state, can deny a person's right to vote because of failure to pay a tax. If the Justice dept. is able to argue that obtaining a photo ID is looked at as having to pay a tax, then it violates the Constitution. Which explains the reason, so many states are pushing for a free photo ID program.

In short, it doesn't matter that the state law is in disagreement with the agreement, the state law trumps the agreement.

The intent of the posting was to convey that a person pays more using an incandescent bulb than a more efficient bulb, based on the extra energy usage. It doesn't matter if energy is subsidized or not, the rate will be the same with both bulbs. Therefore the effect should the same effect as a tax on the behavior (if you were to tax behavior). Adding an actual tax, ends up doubling the tax.

In my observation, people are willing to pay taxes. It's the perceived amount of taxes and what it gets spent on is the issue. When people pay taxes to fund national defense at the federal level, and first responders at a local level, it's a perceived good. When people pay taxes and find their funding studies on shrimp running on treadmills, or for "pancakes for yuppies", it's a perceived WTF. People aren't willing to pay MORE in taxes when there is so much waste with the money they have now.

It has been my experience that this is flat out mis-information. Pre-existing conditions has been a state issue (well technically health care is delegated to being state issues) and the Insurance companies has, for a long time, been forced to accept pre-existing conditions. In fact there are at least 5 states that mandate that there is a insurer of last resort that must except everyone. The difference between what the states have mandated and Obama's "Affordable Care Act", is that insurance companies have been allowed to raise the premium rate if you apply with a pre-existing condition (i.e. place you in a higher risk pool), or deny a claim if you didn't declare it. Now they are not allowed to do either (so if you pay the fee for some number of years and just go to urgent care clinics for routine wellness visits, and find out that you need thousands of dollars of medical care, you still get to turn around and sign up for insurance and pay the same rates as someone that has been carrying insurance for 20+ years and been paying their premiums the entire time).

So what Obama has done, isn't to allow pre-existing conditions, it's to make it illegal to discriminate against them in the form of premium rates.

Disclaimer, I am not an expert on law nor do I even play someone on TV that is an expert on law. This is nothing more than my opinion, how ever misguided and wrong they might be.

On the surface what you're saying sounds right but there's something nagging me that says it's wrong. Copyright is suppose to be a right, but with limitations. Fair use is one of those limitations. The protection is already there and inherently so because it's a limitation. So to say that there's nothing legally wrong in not respecting fair use doesn't sound right (not that there isn't precedence where something that is taken to an extreme nature that it's lost it's meaning).

The protection of fair use is in that the entity is projecting a copyright where they don't have a copyright (i.e. past the limits of copyright). It's no different than if someone off the street tried to sue Disney for copyright infringement on the use of Mickey Mouse. They don't have the copyright and therefor have no right to sue.

First off remember that SunView was incorporated into OpenWindows (as part of the XView toolkit). What I think you were trying to compare was SunView and NeWS. While I agree with you that SunView looked simpler, I definitely don't look back on it with as fond of memories as you do.

I was drawn to UNIX environments because of the customizing of seemingly every aspect of it. Didn't like the some magical limit... Update the header file and recompile your kernel. Didn't like the shell interface, you had plenty to choose from (okay at my time I was in awe that I had /bin/sh and /bin/csh to choose from, ksh was for pay and I was too cheap). SunView was not very customizing. Trying to program using XView (I do thank my lucky stars that I at least started programming after it was ported to X and didn't have to use the native library) was frustrating.

NeWS on the other hand was clunky, sucked up tons of memory (ugh... real time postscript interrupter running on a Sun SLC was slllooowwww) but was completely customizing. Didn't like what you see, or how it worked. Write your own add on and load it up in real time (good thing I was tops in my grade school Logo Turtle class).

ahhhh Now those were the days... Now get off my lawn!

Because the under penalty of perjury statement corresponds to being authorized to act on behalf of the person claiming infringement. Nothing about what they were submitting was true, only that they have the authorization to submit complaints.

So under the DMCA, if I see that you uploaded someplace a Disney video, I can't say "I represent Disney and you need to take it down". Someone authorized by Disney has to submit the claim.

It's a Mac... It's only functional use is as a door stop. The wedge shape has been standard for door stops for eons!!!!

The only way you can write bug-free software is to reduce it to a mathematical proof, all the way down to the OS. Yes down to the OS level, after all it's not like APIs don't have undocumented side effects. Unfortunately I haven't seen many Comp Sci classes being taught lately in algorithm analysis.

You can always test for what you know, but you can't properly test for what you don't know.