ack. I was thinking of Porsche's diesel electric designs. Dunno if he did any turbine-electrics.

Ok, w/o the guns and missiles. Rats.

Seriously, Detroit could have mass-produced an automotive turbine-electric 40 years ago. Dr. Porsche was designing them at least by the '20s.

Next, while there are still tertiary wastewater treatment plants which just burn off the methane they produce, we will read about some 15 yo whiz kid getting kudos, grants and carbon credits for his "why has no one thought of that?" biomass digester for producing fuel gasses Oh, wait...

Now get off my lawn.

Let's dispense with the "shouting fire" strawman for once and for all. 1st, some context. Justice Holmes opinion on *falsely* shouting fire in a crowded theater was intended as an example of dangerous speech which serves no [presumed, see the theater scene in "Torn Curtain" for possible counter scenario] useful purpose. Bear in mind Holmes was writing a majority opinion *against* a pampleteer, Schenk, who was dstributing flyers against the draft during WW1. While you may or may not consider Schenk to be a scurrilous traitor, this does illuminate Holmes's motivation here, as he was using the "fire" example as a direct comparison to Schenk's speech. Subseqently, this decision was overturned, as well.

In the real world, anyone fool enough to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater for no good reason, if he weren't torn limb from limb by the mob, would be subject to all kinds of tort and criminal actions, from reckless endangerment to involuntary manslaughter, or even murder. Even if you want to argue that the speech should, somehow, be anticipated and proscribed by fiat, you'd still have to establish malicious or criminal intent, for which you have all kinds of existing law, with far more fitting penalties, as I just mentioned.

This old canard has no real bearing whatsoever on 1st amendment debates. It should have been retired long ago, but it has an emotional appeal which speech stiflers just can't get enough of.

"You do not have the right to speak in a way that harms people"

Bullshit. You know how hard it is to win a libel or slander judgement in the U.S.? There is no law against bearing false witness, except under oath. And then you have to prove it.

Or what about the truth, when it hurts? Careful with that broad brush, Doc. The ends don't justify the unintended consequences. (or are they?)

Yes, speech, or the publication of thought, is an act, and some non-verbal acts are speech, too. But speech is a protected act in the U.S. "Congress shall make no law", etc. That's why the "fighting words" concept is still part of U.S. law, despite the nanny state wanting to reserve all violence, justified or not, to itself.

These clowns deserve to be horsewhipped by the nearest Jew, but silencing them, silencing speech a priori, and sticking everyone else's head up some collective politically correct ass is not only tyrannical, but myopic and dangerous. I'm sorry U.S. jurisdictions dropped the ball on this one. Obviously they are anticipating the U.S. hate crimes, cyberbullying, etc. bills.

It was a nice run while it lasted, folks.

Reed-Elsevier announced, beginning July 4th of this year, a new licensing structure for Lexis-Nexis articles cited as precedent in court cases. "We expect volume discounting to keep the cost per cite down to $10,000 per case, per judge, and per referencing attorney", a Reed spokesman said.

Hey, it could happen, given Judge Posner's reasoning.

Yes, and after all that "tort reform", too.

Didn't want the Republicans to feel left out in all the flamage of politicians.

"Just like the market in sulphur emissions that GHW Bush helped create back in the day, that took acid rain from a big problem to a minor one."

Did it really, now? Or was it the cheap (yeah, all those corpses were cheap next to $2.00/gal gas) oil? Or did it happen at all? The reduction to a minor problem, that is. In realilty, not politically. I wouldn't mind seeing some figures.

However, for the sake of argument, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Notice however, that we are no closer to production fusion reactors or even fast-breeder fission to charge up all those "green" electric and "non-polluting" hydrogen cars with.

So how about we have a market on radionuclide emssions from coal-fired or even oil-burning power plants? Yeah, I can't see any politicians touching that one with a ten foot pole, either. But yes, logically, while you are correct in theory, at least in the limited context of reducing any given pollutant, you are overlooking 1) avarice and greed mixed with politics stacking the deck, as happened with the prototypical marketization of externalities, wetlands mitigation, and 2) the fact that this whole approach is a bandaid solution to begin with, rife with unintended and unwelcome consequences, not the least of which is further erosion of seemingly unrelated freedoms, economic repression, and stfling of true innovation. It's squeezing the little guy completely out of the picture. And you ignore him at your peril.

You really want to end pollution and environmental disaster, get Congress to stop creating and subsidizing monopolies with measures such as this. Slash spending and entitlements. There is no more money anyway. Repudiate debts, or they will be repudiated for you. Abolish the Fed, repeal the income tax and a bunch of others, and hang the bankers and insurance companies, or at least stop using the U.S. taxpayer as a neverending sink for their obligations, which they weasel out of anyway. Let *real" markets work. It's never really been tried before. The "Robber Baron" era, often cited as unbridled capitalism, was not free markets by any means, and could not have happened without corrupt legislatures waiving liabilities, lavishing grants and subsidies to privilieged elites to start with.. But I digress.

I'm not holding my breath, of course, but don't delude yourself either that cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, etc. will do a damned thing about climate change, except determine who gets air-conditioning and who gets to sweat to pay for it.

I'm sorry. I'm just not in a very optimistc mood today.

http://osu.orst.edu/dept/ncs/photos/minis/bubblessm.jpg
(from http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2004/May04/mariana.htm)

"They found carbon dioxide spewing from rocks under such enormous subsea pressure that it emerged as a bubbling liquid in one site named "champagne vent." And they had to back their equipment away from one ongoing eruption at a site named "Brimstone Pit" when the belching sulfur, acid, boiling water and rocks became too intense."

Anyone have any figures on how many millions of tons of C02 per hour are released by volcanoes? Some of the ones around Guam have apparently been erupting contnously for years. It doesn't all get dissolved, either.

I predict that cap-and-trade, if it happens, will work about like wetlands mitigation. In other words, a totally rigged dog-and-pony show further entrenching the incumbent "stakeholders" at the table of "governance". It will have to, just to pass. Them and a whole new layer of bureaucrats, snitches, and telephone sanitizers.

Just one more nail in the coffin.

This is really pretty simple.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What part of "no law" do people not understand? Despite this, the FTC has been regulating free speech for 40 years or so, if memory serves. Yet we put up with it. Corporate speakers have long since made their deal with this devil (recent example to wit: Disney shill Miley Cyrus pimping the "cyberbullying" bill, ie. political speech about ostensible civility, but inevitably about polictical speech, in other words, precisely the thing the Founders thought necessary to forestall with a 1st amendment.)

It's complete B.S. You cannot legislate ethics, you cannot compel honesty, and you don't alter reality by passing a bill or promulgating a new regulation. Unless and until people start fighting in court and in the legislatrures this insanity will only get worse.

We now return you to your previously scheduled carping about Iranian journalists being rounded up. Don't worry, of course it can't happen here.

Or it could be that the military does not wish to give the civilian bureaucrats over at DHS/NAO (National Applications Office) any excuse to wrest further control over military satellites from the DOD. As conditioned as we are to give facile short shrift to the military establishment's motives in these kinds of secret matters, it may be that this is very definitely the lesser of two evils. The loss to science, or even to national security, is regrettable. Perhaps, esp. in light of the latter, this data is at least being archived for possible scientific analysis at some future date.

I don't guess you can get any more circumspect than that.

I wouldn't mind paying $19.95 or so a month if it included full search and retrieval from the archives. $20 is worth the convenience of kibo'ing or hypertexting back to the antebellum era. Abstracts suck. All they're good for is knowing which microfiche to request when you go to reference room at the library. That's extra work, time, and expense, but mainly, you could miss something important. $5-10 per full text retrieved is sheer larceny, though, when you can print it for 25 cents per page from a microfiche reader.. Many if not most papers that maintain comprehensive online morgues charge these kinds of outrageous fees for fair use and research. That's their privilige, but as we all know, information wants to be free. Now, one-time reprint rights for a single article might be worth $5 (Yes, or more. That's negotiable), but the information is and should be priceless. $20/mo. is reasonable fee for the service of providing easy online access, though. That's negotiable, too, of course, but I'd consider it a reasonable figure. ~$49/mo. might be reasonable for a bundle of all the major dailies in the country, or all the newspapers of record in a single state. And so on and so forth.

Remeber, Mr. Publisher, despite the name, copyright is a privilege, not a right, and there's more than one way to skin a cat. So play nice.

"Craigslist's lawsuit cites an interview McMaster gave to Fox News on Monday, in which he likened the site 'to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."

Or like the local vice cop/Drug Task Force detective/cointelpro operative for the local gentry who lets the whores ply their trade at the motel in exchange for setting up, for politically and/or economically convenient drug busts, the clueless johns, or errant dealers who've crossed one of the local distributors (say, the one whose wife who has a nice sinecure at city hall), in exchange for leniency in their cases, if they'll narc on others, or sometimes for other considerations which shall remain unspecified here?

Nah, such things don't happen in S.C. or neighboring states, not with such stalwart defenders of justice like Hank in charge.

Whores are incredibly useful people to know, sometimes. Make you want to just tear your hair out, others, like when trying to get one anywhere a witness stand, but I digress. Thank goodness for tape recorders, though.

This is a win for Cisco as well. They get plenty of good karma, and put non-compliant competition at a disavantage. All for little or no real cost.

The Linksys routers in question command a premium, even on the used market, precisely because of the GPL and hackability.

Win-win, all around. Any more, Cisco and the FSF would have to get a room. Kudos on a job well done.

...much as some would like. Aside from giving small independent ISP's and VISP's short shrift, Doctorow is ignoring providers like Earthlink, AOL, Netzero, etc., who don't get access to the broadband wires for free (or in some cases AT ALL), not by a long shot. He might as well be a shill for Comcast or Verizon here.

      Now, if you were a small ILEC, whose mere existance was basicly an indulgence from Bellsouth, and the FCC had let you off the hook on access to your DSLAMs, you might understandably not allow anyone else to offer DSL over your wires, given a cable internet franschise and wireless broadband in the same city, and the looming specter of VOIP.

      Conversely if I were a small ISP in the same area I might then consider you a profiteering glutton abusing a monopoly nonetheless, especially if you used that position to muscle in on the PC repair business and city council seats in town as well. Talk about your cartels. The words sub-rosa prior restraint (cf. the fed troll the other day wanting to know if we'd "help host" material detrimental to a PD), tortuous interference, and rackeetering would come to mind as well.

Unless, of course you didn't kick if I used one of my neighbor's CPE wireless routers in a non-commercial manner, as unobtrusively as possible, until I could afford to get at least a couple of T1's installed, now that your line leases have fallen into a reasonable ballpark. Strictly hypothetically speaking, of course.

I have nothing to add to the other comments on Doctorow's main argument.