I think that's exactly right. The White House cannot prohibit commercial use of these photos because they are inherently in the public domain. Copyright isn't waived or limited to certain uses, it just never applies. They have no control whatsoever over how the photo is used.

If a photo is used to imply endorsement, in violation of another set of laws entirely, then it's up to that person to challenge that usage. And, actually, those laws can get pretty vague when dealing with prominent public officials. The White House staff would probably be smarter to simply use their massive communications infrastructure to issue a statement making it clear that the implied endorsement is false and ask for it to be stopped. No need for legal threats except as a last resort.

"His greatest failure was in trying to be bi-partisan."

That's nonsense. Obama made no effort to be bi-partisan, and the Democratic Congressional leadership did everything they could to avoid including the minority on anything.

Until Scott Brown's upset win in Mass the whole bi-partisanship was nothing but lip service anyway. The Democratic supermajority in Congress was enough to pass any legislation they wanted. But key Democrats were not in agreement on the bills, until bribed or coerced by the leadership. The rank-and-file had no idea what was even in the proposed bills.

But the Democrats did not want to pass this legislation without being able to say that the Republicans voted for it too. They wanted cover, and they wanted an excuse.

And in the end Congress worked exactly as it's supposed to. And this bit of stupid legislation, at least, was not passed. I'm thrilled.

"Asimov, President of Mensa and author of hundreds of books, thought that we should revamp the written word to spell things phonetically and do away with much of the silly grammar rules that only please those individuals so pedantic as to master them."

Many people have tried to do this. Most of them were very smart. Yet all of their attempts have failed completely. Can we perhaps conclude that such a project is best left as an academic exercise?

There are lots of problems with these attempts to "simplify" English. The most damning, in my opinion, is how most of them deliberately strip away layers of meaning, centuries of subtext and idiom, from the language. You throw in works from Shakespeare, Poe, and Dickens and out comes an ooze of identical pablum, like a coloring book without any crayons. And why? So lazy people can avoid learning some relatively simple rules of spelling and grammar that public school kids once easily mastered in elementary school.

Yes, English is complicated and occasionally contradictory. It's also incredibly flexible, very precise, and extremely resilient. A person with a poor command of the language can still understand and be understood, at least at a basic level. That's one reason why English is the standard language of air-traffic-control, for example.

And if you want to be able to communicate ideas of higher complexity, then you can demonstrate your ability to think by demonstrating your ability to speak and write clearly and precisely. If it's not worth your time to write well, then it's not worth my time to read.

"And whose standards are we talking about here? MLA style? Chicago? There are half a dozen different ways to place the commas in a list of items depending on the standard to which you are writing."

You exaggerate. But even if that were so, it makes little difference. Just pick a standard and stick with it. Really, it's not hard.

Seems to me the best way to proceed is for someone to just do it, and let everyone else try to catch up. Its not like people will stop using youtube.

Yeah, people here keep saying that, but it's wrong. HTML5 video won't be a viable alternative for at least a year or two.

If my mother-in-law's browser suddenly stops working on YouTube, she's not going to go download an HTML5 compliant browser, or click through four layers of "ARE YOU SURE?" warnings on her existing browser to install some mystery plugin. She'll just get angry at YouTube for breaking her cute kitten videos and find some better site with videos that actually work.

I think Flash has been key to YouTube's success. Almost everyone already has a version installed and it works (to some degree) almost anywhere, including on many embedded and handheld devices. Many, many, many other sites use Flash video. They're not using AVI or Quicktime, or any of the other clumsier video formats that never achieved critical mass on the web.

HTML5 fanboys aside, Flash is the best real-world alternative if you want your video to be viewable by a lot of people.

"The government subsidies may have encouraged a monoculture, but that's beside the point. The GM crops improve yield. Why would that have not been a success in a pure free market?"

First off, "GM products" are not the problem. This particular type of GM product may be a problem. If the summary of the study is correct and if conclusions of the study can be replicated.

There are many, many ways of increasing yields. The government subsidies created a situation where a rapid transition to GM corn was, by and large, the most practical and the most efficient choice. People make rational choices based on the incentives you give them.

For a timely discussion of how all this works in practice, read this:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/12/pepsi-throwback-and-the-sugar-racket/

The major reason we're growing so much corn is because the government has, for decades, kept the price of sugar artificially high. (And to make subsidised ethanol, a more recent development.) And they simultaneously funnel money to the companies that make corn syrup.

In a real free market, one not distorted by the power of the government to redistribute vast sums of money at will, corn crops would have had to compete against other crops which might have been more profitable to grow. And the manufacturers of corn syrup (which would now be sold at true cost) would have had to compete on an even playing field against sugar growers on factors like price, taste, and mouth-feel. But by making sugar super-expensive and corn syrup super-cheap, the government all but ensures one single outcome.

Think about that the next time you want the government to "fix" something.

"The availability of the technology is not relevant to whether or not the government is stepping on your rights."

Sure, but the trick is figuring out what constitutes "stepping on your rights", and how that changes over time.

It sounds to me like the court is using price and "in general use" as proxies for how much privacy people can/should reasonably expect.

Thirty years ago things like compact wireless video cameras were nearly unknown. Now they're built into your sixth-grader's phone. So in 1978 an average person might reasonably object to being "filmed" in a public place without their knowledge. It's no longer reasonable today, or we'd all be de-facto criminals. Things change.

So what happens in five years, when (real) thermal imagers are sold as toys on Amazon?

"The technology to break into your house has always been cheap and available yet for some reason surveillance is treated differently."

That's because surveillance is different. Sitting outside your house and watching you come and go is not breaking-and-entering. Someone watching, even listening, to you in public is not the same as someone breaking into your home. They are different things with different rules and expectations.

"I'm afraid with this newly designed, improved internet...that a major side effect is that it will become less free, and more controlled."

Um, that's a "side effect" in the same way instant death is a "side effect" of leaping into the path of a speeding train. In other words it's an inevitable and completely predictable outcome.

Which is why I really cannot understand the chorus of people who think that having the government (any government) own and operate all your Internet connectivity is such an awesome idea. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

I strongly suspect that they have been creating fake feeds for some time. And that they now know that it's no longer an effective strategy.

The military employs a lot of very clever people, and they do these things for a living. They just don't post about them on Slashdot, or talk about them to the WSJ.

"Making important decisions on the basis of "Eh, our enemies are just ignorant mud farmers anyway, no problem", on the other hand, is colossally arrogant and extremely dangerous."

I'm not sure that's a fair caricaturization of their reasoning.

As many Slashdot readers are in a position to know, upgrades can be complicated and encryption always adds overhead. Which is exactly what the Air Force explains in the article:

The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there's no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter....Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies. "There's a balance between pragmatics and sophistication," said Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.

It's easy to look at vulnerabilities in isolation, but there are always tradeoffs. Up-armoring Humvees, for example, made them slower, less manuverable, and increased fuel consumption. If there was not a need for additional armor it would be a net disadvantage to add it. Similarly, upgrading hardware and software in a critical military system designed in the 1990's and actively deployed around the world is not trivial, and not something you're likely to do without a good reason. Now they have a good reason, so they're going to do it. That makes sense to me.

"Halliburton is not in the defense business to defend. They're in the defense business to make money"

What?! You mean to tell me that Halliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric are not staffed by monks who've taken a vow of poverty?

People who aren't in business to make money seldom manage to stay in business long enough to do anything at all. And I'd much rather contractors operate at a profit than be perpetual budgetary basket-cases like NASA.

"Costa Del Haering. Haeringville. Marina del Haering. Tacoburg... Tacoburg?!"

That's true, but folks should not make assumptions about those services based solely on location. Many extremely rural homes do, in fact, have electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. They're just provided privately by the owners of the property via generators and/or solar, wells, and septic tanks. No municipal services required or desired.

I know it sounds all tin-foil-hat-y, but the prospect that CO2 policy could be used to keep richer nations dominant via IP has been haunting me for some time.

Well, yeah. Stupid, fraudulent spectacles like Copenhagen illustrate that fairly clearly.

The assumption behind the entire CO2 hysteria is that the rest of the world does not really deserve the comforts that we take for granted. So the assembled carbon racketeers are perfectly happy to forbid the most cost-effective technologies available to the developing world to improve the lives of their citizens. After all, we've got ours.

Hell, many of them would clearly prefer the surplus third-world population of to simply die off. But some people get all squeamish about that, so keeping them poor, sick, and dependent on the charity of the "international community" is the next best alternative.

The problem isn't that people aren't automatically believing science, it's almost the exact opposite: people are automatically doubting science.

People aren't doubting science, necessarily. They're just not as ready to accept everything a scientist claim is "science". Some scientists don't like this, preferring to think themselves above such elementary barriers of trust. That's too bad for them.

Doubt is good. Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.

"The computers were configured to run 24/7 by school policy. A previous attempt to get them to run only from 6am to 6pm was met with "you're not allowed to do that" by the school board, even though it was explained that it would save $90k per annum in electricity."

I don't think we can say if this was a good decision or not without knowing the school board's reasoning.

Were there often people working outside of those standard hours? Did people need to remote in to their machines? Did they use the overnight window for automated patchloads or updates? Would allowing the machines to simply sleep have accomplished the same thing, but with a lot less effort?