Of course most people will say that. It's about Terrorism, after all, and they are not Terrorists, so the government is only spying on Other People, right?

And it's not so bad that other bad people give up a little of their privacy to keep US safer.

We're some way off global, carbon-free energy production, as you point out. But that's not the problem this is solving.

Of course energy from garbage contributes greenhouse gases. But this is not displacing greenhouse-gas-free nuclear or wave power generation - it is reducing the dependency on high-running-cost, greenhouse-gas-producing oil / gas / coal power. So it increases sustainability to that extent. That is a good thing. And less landfill is also a good thing.

It's not about "shiny", so much as improving things where and when we can. But we need to increase reuse and recycling (in that order), and reduce waste caused by built-in obsolescence, excess packaging, and excessive consumption too.

It sounds troubling, but it's hardly even a Government proposal for legislation, never mind a Bill being laid before parliament. And the decision to withhold the draft may still be appealed.

This seems to be an early draft (a bit like the ACTA negotiations, perhaps) since the grounds for withholding are:

• the material is still in draft form
• the material has not gone through the necessary whole-of-government review and approval processes; and
• to release such material at this stage would, in [the bureaucrat's] view, prejudice the current negotiations and decision making processes which are in train

So the Department concerned is probably committed to something like the draft, and they are trying to work out what is feasible, but the rest of the government has not yet had a chance to comment.

The appropriate response at this stage is probably (1) appeal, (2) contact representatives in government and opposition who may oppose any provisions that threaten civil liberties, and (3) use the media (and slashdot) to raise awareness that something is coming in the future.

But it is not normal to release early drafts (that have not yet been thought through properly) to the public - at that stage you could not possibly have a workable policy, and people may get very worked up about errors that the government themselves will address. Surely the time for public scrutiny is when concrete proposals are made?

Though crowdsourcing of bills might be interesting... it worked for the constitution in Iceland, didn't it?

So does this mean that in the war on weather, we can use the drones to shoot down hurricanes and suspected hurricanes before they reach the US?

Great news, I think (clearly I didn't have time to read the summary).

TFA is a bit light. I'm wondering how you review a score? Was it "muse score software didn't display this note properly", or "the music would sound better if you went up instead of down here, or repeated a theme differently"?

Open source music, now there's an idea. Could be like composing by committee...

Is that how they named the "World Series"?
To be fair, I guess all the teams are actually in "the world" :)

As I said in an earlier post, the" MAY" clauses are a problem, because the governments / lobbyists who write the legislation required by the treaty will include them! Good luck with teh line-by-line scrutiny of the bills as they pass through your legislatures.

> The parts the EFF seems worried about are, in RFC terms, MAY clauses, not MUST or even SHOULD clauses.

The problem?
The ACTA treaty confers powers with dangerously broad and ambiguous language - an example is language to ban:

a device or product, including computer programs, or provision of a service that... has only a limited commercially significant purpose other than circumventing an effective technological measure.

So legitimate purposes that are significant, but can be made out not to be commercially significant, won't protect you. Education and research purposes, and fair use gone, at one stroke!

The international coordination is all about the interests of "intellectual property" owners (mostly distributors, in the content industries), and not about consumers or the broader creative economy. The only stakeholders explicitly mentioned are "rights holders" - if we're lucky, the rest of the world may sneak in as "other relevant
stakeholders" - but don't hold your breath - it hasn't happened yet, and isn't happening in the shady negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. And the only measurement or analysis to be done is about how well they tackle the nut of infringement, with no examination of the sledgehammer of social and economic costs of the enforcement regime ACTA requires.

Then there are the optional extras such as:

A Party may exclude from the application of this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travellers’ personal luggage. [a Good Thing]

and

A Party may provide for the remedies described in this Article to be carried out at the infringer’s expense. [not necessarily A Good Thing]

A good government would implement the protections ACTA says they MAY do, and omit some of the more onerous and opressive powers the lobbyists got into ACTA as optional extras.

Our governments, on the other hand, will use draft legislation written by the same content industry lobbyists who wrote the original ACTA policy shopping list, and will try to omit every inconvenient consumer protection measure some ACTA negotiaters insisted on, and include each of the overreaching powers the negotiators reduced from MUST to MAY in ACTA.

Or we can just stop worrying and hope that the law-faries will bring us cuddly, fair and reasonable legislation that servers the public interest, instead.