When you sent your damn puritans over here.

PBR is what passed for good beer in 1893. (hence the blue ribbon)

That said, it's still better than most mega breweries' swill.

I think that speaks more to the state of their system for handling classified information than their logic. If a wikileaks document somehow makes it into their repository, it could infect it, since you don't really know that it hasn't been doctored.

That such a document could make it into their repository is a much more concerning prospect.

eh I don't think that's the case.

Mostly, I think news organizations are still trying to get their heads around the massive document dump. But the collateral murder video definitely sparked debate about how we should be using force.

Besides, the wikileak angle is interesting, and it is news, I'm not going to begrudge anyone for talking about it. Similarly in the '70s the leak aspect of the pentagon papers was news and was covered, and until he outed himself figuring out who deepthroat was was a favorite past time of conspiracy theorists.

before someone gets all righteous on me - sometimes when dealing with immoral law, civil disobedience is warranted. Copyright is not one of those cases.

The founders started the constitution with "We the people...", not "but I wanna."

Its a society, and sometimes that means living with rules you don't particularly like.

If you read Goldstein v. California you'll find that while congress is prohibited from granting unlimited copyrights (they can however extend them indefinitely... but that's another argument) there is no such bar to stop state legislatures from issuing unlimited copyright.

Ordinarily this would be a supremacy issue, but Congress is only authorized to grant copyrights, not mandated to, and in the area of pre-1972 audio recordings they deferred. This made an opening for state regulation, and they could do whatever they want. This also means that pre-1972 audio recording copyright law is different everywhere, so if you're dealing with any old recordings, find a good lawyer.

Check with a copyright attorney.

The summary and TFA are a little overblown. Works made between 1923 and 1972 might not enter the public domain in some states (probably California) before 2049 at the earliest, but it may already be in the public domain in other states. On the one hand, since New York was and still is a hub of the radio and entertainment industry they may have made a special provision for copyrighting audio recordings. On the other, it may be permissible to drive over the bridge to New Jersey and copy it there.

In fact a great deal of the reasoning in Goldstein v. California relies on the fact that pre-1972 audio recording copyright varies from state to state in order for it not to run afoul of the supremacy clause.

A large percentage of humans are altruistic. A small percentage aren't. It doesn't take that many people to look out for themselves for a strongman to install himself as leader. The history of society hasn't been campfires and kum-ba-ya - not withing groups, and certainly not between them.

If we could all just get along we wouldn't need government in the first place.

As for the difference between Africa and Western Civilization, a brief comparison of body counts quickly demonstrates that we're not the kinder gentler society.

The only think the house has to watch out for is angry gamblers burning the casino to the ground.

Nah, that decision was based on the fact that IR scanning cameras aren't readily available, so the pubic reasonably expects that people can't see through their roofs. Google earth is different, and so are helicopters for that matter. You wouldn't have much of a chance getting a drug conviction thrown out because the cops spotted the marijuana plants in your backyard from a helicopter. It is unreasonable to think that your open backyard isn't in plain view of the public.

During the gilded age we were on specie backed currency. In fact, one of the biggest political battles of the era was for "free silver" and cost William Jennings Bryant the presidential election no less than 3 times, and he wasn't even arguing for fiat currency! He just wanted to change the specie.

As for corporations - what exactly is your beef? That the government protects investors? And how, exactly would the economy be better with less investment? Corporate personhood is a red herring, it's easy to get upset about the logic of it all, but it has little or no bearing on how business is actually conducted - and it certainly didn't in the 1880s. The only important debate surrounding corporate personhood is as to how far the constitutional protection of free speech extends, specifically are corporate campaign donations to political complains protected. In the gilded age with it's machine politics, and virtually no campaign finance rules it was a complete non-issue.

Of course I'm willing to assume some risk and not others. That's what living in the real world is all about. And yes, the level of intrusion absolutely plays a role in what I'm willing to accept, which is why I'm not comfortable letting the government mandate my birth control method of choice, but I am ok taking my vehicle through an emissions check.

Your property is not your body. The pool you build in your yard does not reflect your sperm count.

You may choose to build a bunker because you don't trust your neighbor, but we, as society, have chosen to enforce certain building regulations so that whole cities don't burn down. Experience has shown that many people will choose cheap and dangerous over expensive and safe any day of the week, and that when a critical mass of people choose based on frugality there are very real public safety risks to everyone. To avoid this we need minimum building standards, and they need to be enforced.

What is mildly amusing is that we've tried the libertarian Utopian, and it was called the gilded age. Gilded because there was a little bit of opulence covering a mass of shit. Given the opportunity your neighbor will enrich himself without considering what impact it has on you. Sometimes you might be able to claim damages, like when he dumps his sewage onto your land, other times you can't, like when he builds slummy apartments right up to the edge of your property. We, as society, have chosen to forbid people from making certain private property decisions that damage other people. Is there a balance between freedom to act and freedom from undeserved harm? Yeah, but such is life.

Besides, I have a hard time believing that you're opposed to all government mandated inspection. Do you really have a problem with mandatory immunization for school children? I can assure you that the lack of mumps outbreaks isn't imaginary security, and I can also assure you that without mandates herd immunity will suffer. Are you really opposed to the FDA inspecting your meat? Yeah, it's an affront to the property rights of the slaughterhouse operator, but food safety isn't an imaginary security - and no, we won't ever know which operators are safe and which aren't.

Really? That's the solution? This is why I never understood the Ron Paul crowd.

Here's the deal. If my neighbor built such a shitty pool that it couldn't pass inspection I know he can't cover the cost of damage to my property. So I make an insurance claim, and who pays for that? EVERYONE.

Let's make it real simple. There is a social aspect to risk, therefore there is a social responsibility to mitigate risk, which is why building permits isn't a great intrusion into your property rights, it's common sense.

There's dozens of things that could be wrong with your pool that you didn't think to check, that's the point of building permits, to remind you that there are rules before the pool is built. An engineer can look at a plan and sign off on it without having to visit the site. After the pool is built how is he going to know what concrete was used?

Yes, an important part of this is revenue generation for the city. Yes, the big brother aspects of what this city is doing makes me uncomfortable. But there's nothing wrong with requiring building permits, and there's nothing wrong with penalizing people who flaunted the rule and got found out later. At any rate, they won't be able to sell their house until their pool is inspected anyway (which is how the city ought to deal with this problem - not by firing up google earth.)