I wonder if it’s legal to shoot your neighbors and then claim self defense on the grounds that they were trying to kill you with sleep deprivation?
From the August 2010 issue of Reason Magazine:
“It’s a double standard,” Akram Allos, owner of Sinbad Café in Dearborn, complained to the Detroit Free Press. “Just because we didn’t have a lobbyist, why should we have to suffer?”
That is why you have to suffer, Mr. Allos. Welcome to the land of the fee and the home of the slave.
California’s Gay Marriage Ban Overturned.
Today a federal judge in California overturned that state’s ban on gay marriage, ruling that it violates the 14th Amendment’s command that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In response to a lawsuit filed by several same-sex couples, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker concluded that Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that amended California’s constitution to prohibit gay marriage, “unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”
[Hit and Run]
It’s pretty rare for the 14th Amendment to be enforced. I suspect that if this case had involved any significant restraint on government power, the outcome would have been different.
These people are so crooked they screw their socks on in the morning…
BladeForums.com Post
I died and turned into a Roman. It’s very distracting.
Doctor Who
Women priest law ‘a slap in face’. The Vatican’s decision to make the ordination of women a “grave crime” - the same term it uses to describe sexual abuse - is condemned by women’s church groups. [BBC News]
But if the Vatican regards women priests the same way they do sexual abuse, doesn’t that mean that women are free to be priests whenever they want and the Vatican will either ignore them or cover it up (or both)?
New at Reason: John Stossel on Government Attacks on Freedom.
Something’s happened to America, writes John Stossel, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble. We’ve become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. The problem is top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.
View this article.
Here’s another quote from the end of the article:
Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more—so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible. This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more—so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.
This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
I remember when I was a kid there was a saying: “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” but I haven’t heard anyone say that in years (another one from the same time that’s also now dead was “it’s a free country”). Today ignorance of the law is still no excuse from a legal standpoint, but at the same time knowledge of the law is an impossibility.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Let’s keep this one short and sweet. According to the official government statistics, the US economy shed another 125,000 jobs in June. Wouldn’t it then be reasonable for the unemployment rate to climb? You would think so, right? You’d be wrong. See, in addition to the terrible news about job losses, there’s horrific news that […] [Mike Makes Right]
According to Shadow Government Statistics, the true unemployment rate is around 22%. This number includes those people who have given up on ever finding a job, who have been officially ignored by the government since 1994 because it made the government look bad.
Cryptography Success Story. From Brazil: the moral, of course, is to choose a strong key and to encrypt the entire drive, not just key files. [Schneier on Security]
The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil. The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code, Brazil’s Globo newspaper reports.
The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil.
The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code, Brazil’s Globo newspaper reports.
I use TrueCrypt to protect the Windows laptop I use for work. Unfortunately, the Mac version doesn’t support whole disk encryption.
After using Dropbox long enough to be satisfied that its performance would remain good and my files wouldn’t spontaneously disappear, I decided to try using it in conjunction with Calibre. Calibre is an open-source and cross-platform ebook management program which organizes ebooks in all different formats and can convert between most of them. I use it to keep track of all the ebooks I’ve downloaded for my Kindle from sources other than Amazon — which is actually the majority of them. Like most open-source projects it has a ghastly user interface, but it works well despite that handicap.
Kindles are recharged through the USB cable that connects them to a computer, and I’ve been connecting mine to the Mac Pro I use for working with photos — it’s easy to plug it in and set it out of the way to recharge when sitting on a desk. However, I actually download ebooks fairly often on my laptop or generate them using Fanfiction Downloader on my PC. In the past I’ve then moved the ebooks over to my Mac Pro via iDisk, but as I’ve mentioned before iDisk doesn’t perform all that well.
Calibre lets you specify where you want your ebook library to be located in its preferences, so I moved the folder it had been using on the Mac Pro into my Dropbox and pointed Calibre to the new location. I then installed Calibre on the other two computers, and now I’ve got access to my library from three different computers. When I download an ebook on my laptop I can stick it in Calibre there, add any metadata I like, and the next time I plug my Kindle in to my Mac Pro it’s there already, waiting to be copied over to the Kindle. So far this has worked out very well.
