In which case those US customs agents should have a search warrant to check those DVDs unless the basic principals that the United States was founded on have been majorly violated.

#include <ianal.h>

It's 4:30 in the morning and I don't feel like digging up case law right now. Unfortunately, the law (and the courts) have said for the last, oh, 150 years or so that the rights enshrined in the Constitution do not apply at the border.

I blame that villainous scofflaw of human rights, Abraham Lincoln.

I wonder if by chance this will finally be the thing that will make them close our border down south?

You mean stop letting my coworkers and neighbors go down to Cancun so they can come back here and infect me and my children with swine flu? Excellent idea!

Oh. You were talking about the guys in front of the labor pickup area. Seen 'em. Don't talk to 'em. Don't drink with 'em. They're not a big health concern to me.

Thx. I learned something new from this thread. And me without an XP machine to test it on.

Anyone who says Macs are virus-proof doesn't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

Macs ARE harder to inject viruses into because the limited privilege escalation system used by Macs (and Linux) reduces the opportunities to run processes as root.

On pre-Vista Windows boxes, most people ran their default account with godlike administrator privileges. It's either that or:

Run a restricted account
Any time you want to install software
DO:
    log out of your restricted account
    log into the admin account
    install the software
    then go back to your restricted account.
REPEAT

After doing this about 5 or six times, you get frustrated and switch the "Administrator" flag on your restricted account and thus leave yourself open to attack any time you download something (or navigate to a malware page if you're running IE).

The vector for infection for this botnet was escalating privileges to install CS 3. It only happens once, and only happens briefly, but once is all you need!

America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.

There are several comments in this thread that would be good as a jumping-off point for the role of the Net in preventing authoritarian tendencies. Yours seemed good. Congratulations!

Let's look at a few things:

1) The US has, by law if not necessarily by practice, one of the freest flows of information in the world. There is no prior restraint (q.v. UK, Canada), there are no laws restricting hate speech (q.v. Germany), libel cases are notoriously hard to prosecute (lots of places), and judges have historically given a lot of protection to people who bring forth government "secrets" which expose wrongdoing by members of the government.

2) While I won't say there was no vote fraud anywhere, because I don't believe that, the democratic processes here work pretty well on the whole. Let's say that 99% of the voters in the US were able to get to the polls and voted for the candidate of their choice. The US is not Zimbabwe.

3) What was going on vis a vis torture, detentions, illegal declarations of war, etc. was not some big secret that you had to get from samizdat sold in a back alley. Pick up a major newspaper, tune into NPR, or even watch CNN, and what the Bush administration was doing was being lovingly documented, even if there was a lot more deference to state power than the situation deserved. And, of course, any one of a number of bloggers and alternative news sources dug in to their offenses with relish.

So, with all that access to information, Mr. Bush and his enablers won two Presidential elections and three (arguably more if you go back to 1994) congressional elections. While a lot of heat is made of potential vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, the fact is that most states were not very close. (FWIW Bush lost my state by 5% the first time and 7% the second time).

The question this poses is, if so much chicanery can be done in plain sight, with the approval of we the people in a society with some of the best access to information on the planet, what difference can the Internet make in a country without this sort of infrastructure? I would argue that if you control the primary sources of information, what leaks out around it does not make much difference. This is unfortunately a human and not a technical problem.

I'm quite familiar with Libertarian philosophy. Classic Libertarianism falls into the trap of assuming that the majority of participants will be rational players, and seems to overlook the damage that a few irrational players can cause to the public good, expecting that contracts or covenants will stand in the stead of a state that occasionally has to crack the heads of criminals. I do like Breake Breathed's quote "...you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."

I really am a card-carrying liberal. Social safety net, single-payer health care, progressive taxation, etc. I just want money taken by the state to be used for maximum benefit (and thus minimum cost for that benefit), and I would err on the side of personal liberty if a protective state starts to interfere with that (again, lots of asterisks). I am also leery of social transfers which discourage people from working. You need a safety net to keep people from starving or sleeping on the streets, but you have to be very careful that this doesn't turn into a permanent dole. If that means the safety net ends after a certain number of years (as it does now), so be it.

besides this is all about what Rush thinks Obama is going to try to do. If Obama turns around and starts trying to revive the economy using methods that Rush is espousing, then he'll wish Obama all the success in the world implementing his plans.

Rush is a large part of the problem with the modern Republican Party.

I think the core precepts of conservative government are largely correct. Money that is put in the hands of the private sector will be used to generate more money by adding value. (We hope. Sometimes that goes wrong). Money that is put in the hands of the public sector can help people generate wealth (schools providing educated people, highways being able to transport goods, etc.) but can also result in social transfers which, while they may have some benefits in alleviating poverty (a good thing) do not create wealth in and of themselves. You have a finite quantity of capital and putting capital into the hands of the public sector will render that money (at least initially) unavailable to the private sector.

Mind you, I would put lots of asterixes and "yes, buts" after all of those statements, but I think the fundamental premise is sound enough. Government should run as efficiently as possible with as little money as possible. Feeding money into government for the sake of feeding money in is not constructive. Perhaps, more to the point, the private sector has a natural check and balance in that if you are spending more than you make year in and year out, you'll go out of business sooner or later. The only check on the state spending frivolously are the actions of the people to keep an eye on that spending.

Rush has gone down a blind alley which makes a parody of a basically sound philosophy. "All conservative ideas are good, for all cases, no matter what! All liberal ideas are bad no matter what! Government is the problem! It cannot solve problems! etc. etc."

Rush is a blowhard who talks on the radio four hours a day. BFD. Unfortunately, his idiotically simple-minded philosophy on government and taxation have also been adopted by a lot of people who really should know better. The Republican Party is poorer for listening to him, and is dangerously close to drifting into irrelevance, much to the detriment of the country as a whole.

Sincerely,

Bleeding-Heart Liberal Against a Single-Party State.

I was going to find the constitutional case law behind this, but came up empty-handed after an exhaustive 5 minute search. You'll have to do your own search or take my word for it.

Long story short: There is very old case law which establishes that you do not enjoy the same rights at the border as you do in your home. This is why if you come back from a trip overseas, if the nice person at Customs says "open your suitcase", you argue the 4th amendment with them at your peril. Please note the little signs that state that you may be held at the border for up to 72 hours without charges before you do so. This has permitted Customs to board ships at sea, and border agents to dump your car since the early 1800s. (100 years before cars. Prescient mofos, weren't they?).

I am guessing that the current administration has probably pushed well past the intent granted by the courts in those earlier rulings, but none of the cases of their abuse has come up for judicial review yet, so my guesses aren't worth very much.

There's an issue that a lot of developing countries have.

When you're at Vietnam's level of development, the piracy rate is astonishing. 99% of the software is pirated. All the software used at home is pirated. Most of the software used in government offices is pirated. Most of the software used in companies is pirated. Sometimes some do-gooder will wind up buying legitimate software, but that's really rare.

MS knows this. Everyone knows this. In a country with a per-capita income of $1000 a year, there's simply not a dollar at the end of this conversation. Yell, scream, protest to the World Court. Nothing will happen. There's no money to take.

So nothing happens.

Development moves along. Cheap furniture and rattan baskets turn into power tools. Christmas lights turn into consumer electronics. Power tools become CNC machines. Consumer electronics become silicon fabs.

Suddenly, you're not a dollar-a-day country any more. You've got real money. Moreover, your money comes from exports.

At this point, Microsoft comes back again. This lax attitude towards intellectual property? Beggar countries are allowed to slip by. Middle-to-high income countries? Uh-uh.

Your legislature is given a modest proposal. Produce intellectual property laws and enforce them, or the export-driven capital party comes to a grinding halt.

You now have a nascent IT infrastructure in your government offices which was built on pirated MS software. What was winked at for years is winked at no more.

Your IT managers now have a very expensive problem. Purchase licenses for every machine in government use, or retool for open source. Your choice. Both options suck.

By starting on OSS early, Vietnam is making a smart choice which will save a lot of pain down the road.

#include <truestory.h>
I was in Turin over Christmas visiting some relatives by marriage.

One of the relatives at Christmas dinner was a retired Fiat engineer.

He told a story once about working on a seatbelt design. He sat at his drafting table for days. Nothing. The design eluded him.

Finally, after five days of designer's block, he went home, plodded down to the basement, pulled out the 5 gallon demijohn of wine which is standard equipment in any well-appointed household in Italy, and poured a glass. Then another. And another. Pleasantly buzzed proceeded quickly to plowed and then straight to s-faced.

Deep into his cups, the design for the seatbelt came at last. He napkin-sketched the design and drew it out in full the next day at work.

Having heard this story related to me, I was Enlightened.

old guard also does always happen.

s/does/does not/

Speaking of lame...

But it is also boring and lame.

I agree that it's boring and lame. If Singapore is the logical conclusion to Chinese affluence, we can probably be assured of Yet Another American Century.

I merely was stating that the argument that prosperity -> democracy does not always happen, and that democracy -> a sharp and unpleasant end for the old guard also does always happen.

It won't last though. There's a generation of children being born who will take economic prosperity for granted. It's the nature of humanity, and by that same token they'll want more than just that. With economic power in their hands they'll want political power, and that's when the government will be in trouble.

Maybe, maybe not.

Taiwan went from single-party (and single-family) rule to a full-fledged democracy in the course of about 15 years. The old farts who had been running (and robbing) the country were quietly retired and a generation which was willing to allow more political pluralism were seated in their place. This happened with a lot of protests, legislative fistfights, and more than a few cracked heads on the street, but it did not involve putting the heads of the Old Guard up on a post in the process.

On the other side, Singapore has become wildly prosperous, with no sign of democracy or pluralism anywhere in sight. The People's Action Party (read: Senior Minister Harry Lee and his son Lee Hsien Loong) still run everything. It's a weird place. It's clean, it's modern. People go in, people go out. If living in the Lees's Disneyland pisses you off, you're free to go to Australia, or the US, or wherever you like. Everyone knows the rules, and nobody rocks the boat.