California’s Prop 75. Cal­i­for­nia is hav­ing a Novem­ber 8 spe­cial elec­tion with nation­wide con­se­quences. Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, because of the impli­ca­tions if it wins and its momen­tum spreads sim­i­lar ini­tia­tives through­out the coun­try, is Propo­si­tion 75, which would require pub­lic employee unions to obtain mem­bers’ per­mis­sion before using their dues for polit­i­cal activ­i­ties. The large stakes are reflected in cam­paign spend­ing of over $100 mil­lion, with sub­stan­tial amounts from out­side the state.

Pro­po­nents call it “pay­check pro­tec­tion,” since it pro­tects employ­ees from union spend­ing for polit­i­cal pur­poses they oppose. Unions say it is about weak­en­ing the polit­i­cal voice of work­ing peo­ple. But even beyond the facts that all work­ers would remain free to con­tribute to what­ever causes they sup­port and more than a third of union mem­bers rou­tinely oppose posi­tions union lead­ers fund (and mem­bers have been reported as roughly evenly split on the mea­sure), that claim is note­wor­thy only for its brazen mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion. [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

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Anthony Gre­gory at LewRockwell.com -

The Dead Ends of Tech­ni­cal­i­tar­i­an­ism — why Irwin Schiff’s approach
to avoid­ing income tax is bass ack­wards. The gum­mint doesn’t care
about its own laws. Never did. Never will. It is a crim­i­nal
enter­prise, sup­ported by theft and mur­der. Always was. Always will
be. [claire­files]
bq.
Draw­ing on the tech­ni­cal­i­ties of law as the chief tac­tic of fight­ing
the state has its severe lim­i­ta­tions and draw­backs, how­ever. Instead
of help­ing to expose the naked emperor or the man behind the cur­tain,
it can lead us to grant unde­served legit­i­macy to the state. To obsess
over the income tax as a sup­posed vio­la­tion of statu­tory law is to
give far too much cre­dence to statu­tory law. The rea­son income tax is
wrong is that it’s theft, not because some leg­is­la­tor back in 1913
failed to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. More­over, if enough Amer­i­cans
began call­ing the IRS’s alleged bluff, and stopped fil­ing, the state
would sim­ply make the income tax “offi­cial” and “prop­erly rat­i­fied” in
any ways it had pre­sum­ably failed to do so.

…

The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about loot­ing
and vio­lence. Its prin­ci­pal meth­ods of fund­ing are theft and
coun­ter­feit­ing, its reg­u­lar modus operandi is extor­tion and its most
con­spic­u­ous projects are assault and mur­der. Ulti­mately, find­ing a
tech­ni­cal­ity that saves Amer­i­cans from income tax­a­tion will prove as
effec­tive as find­ing one that saves for­eign­ers from incom­ing
U.S. mis­siles. (Can you imag­ine an Iraqi scream­ing at the bomb­ing of
Bagh­dad that since the war had not been declared prop­erly, the
explo­sions can­not legally hurt him?) A loop­hole might save you money
in the short term, but it will likely do you no good if the IRS has it
in for you, and it will cer­tainly do lit­tle in the long term to help
in the eter­nal clash with the state.

Instead of search­ing for the magic loop­hole that will swal­low up the
state and all its oppres­sion, we should devote our time to learn­ing
about how the state actu­ally works, its his­tor­i­cal and mod­ern
rela­tion­ships with the pri­vate and semi-private sec­tors, and the
effects of its domes­tic and for­eign inter­ven­tions. We should not fool
our­selves. The state does not steal our incomes because we have
over­looked a con­fus­ing reg­u­la­tion or fail to know our case law. The
rea­son we have an income tax is because the politi­cians in power want
an income tax, and have bam­boo­zled the pub­lic into believ­ing that
tax­a­tion is accept­able in the first place. The tax code is con­fus­ing
and con­tra­dic­tory for all sorts of his­tor­i­cal and oper­a­tional rea­sons,
but it cer­tainly does not con­tain the final key to our free­dom from
tax­a­tion.
[End the War on Free­dom]

Cell Phone Sur­veil­lance. Mis­souri will track people’s move­ments through their cell phones. [Schneier on Secu­rity]

It’s because of this sort of thing that I wouldn’t carry a cell phone even if I did have a use for one.

Link: Pet­teri pon­tif­i­cates on full-frame DSLRS (aka Canon EOS 5D). There’s a won­der­ful blo­grant called Petteri’s Pon­tif­i­ca­tions. In his most recent episode, Pet­teri Sulo­nen pon­tif­i­cates on full-frame DSLRs and the Canon EOS 5D. You may not agree with him, espe­cially if you’re a Nikon afi­cionado, but it’s an inter­est­ing read. Now all Pet­teri needs to do is shell out the $3 for a real domain name. [Photoethnography.com]

I wouldn’t say I’m an “afi­cionado,” but I do own Nikon equip­ment, and I agree with him. Two of the advan­tages of full-frame DSLRs which he men­tions are less noise at high ISO set­tings and lenses behav­ing as they’re meant to. Since I pho­to­graph pri­mar­ily in very dark places where I don’t have much abil­ity to move around, these are very impor­tant to me. So impor­tant, in fact, that I wouldn’t even con­sider buy­ing a Nikon DSLR unless it was full-frame.

Are Skimpy Raises the New Nor­mal?. Lam1969 writes “Com­put­er­world just released their lat­est salary sur­vey, and it finds that IT worker bees have once again only received small raises. The arti­cle notes, “IT raises still lagged slightly behind the aver­age of about 3.2% for all U.S. work­ers as reported by the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. While the major­ity of respon­dents (69%) said their 2004 base salary increased from one year ago, 31% expe­ri­enced either no change in salary or had their pay cut.” It goes on to quote LAN spe­cial­ist Stephen Nois­seau as say­ing, “I guess that’s the way the cookie crum­bles … I’ll take 4% over noth­ing. We’re get­ting basi­cally cost-of-living raises.”” [Slash­dot]

In my expe­ri­ence the only way to get more money in this field is to get a job at another com­pany that pays more.

Five Years Later: It Still Sucks. It’s been five years since I men­tioned that email clients
suck infi­nitely.

Noth­ing has changed. It’s the same on the Mac and the PC.

This is com­mod­ity soft­ware that we all use, but because it’s nearly all
free the inno­va­tion hap­pens elsewhere.

I use Mail­smith,
a com­mer­cial (read: not free) email client. It’s the best I’ve ever
used, but it still doesn’t sup­port IMAP. I want to switch to IMAP, but
I don’t want to drop the 99 other Mail­smith fea­tures I’d hate to go
with­out, like it’s awe­some fil­ter­ing system.

Jus­ton Wood started
this round of the con­ver­sa­tion. I picked it up on Brent’s site
this morn­ing. By Seth Dilling­ham. [Truer Words — A Jour­nal]

I wouldn’t put it so strongly, but I’m also not com­pletely happy with the email clients avail­able. I cur­rently use the last Mac OS ver­sion of Entourage, which gen­er­ally works well, but some­times spam (which is often mal­formed) causes it to crash.

I have a File­maker data­base for archiv­ing email, with a Fron­tier suite for get­ting mes­sages from an email app and mov­ing them into the data­base. This lim­its the use­able email apps to Mac OS apps which have good script­ing sup­port. Unforunately some oth­er­wise good email clients, such as Thun­der­bird, are not scriptable.

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Vin Suprynow­icz at the Las Vegas Review-Journal -

Nature cult’s devi­ous tac­tics exposed — one rancher struck back,
in court, against the envi­rowhackos, and won, big time. Far
out. [root]
bq.
Mr. Chilton said he would have been happy with the vin­di­ca­tion of a $1
dam­age award.

But the Tuc­son jury was not so for­giv­ing, award­ing $600,000, includ­ing
$500,000 in puni­tive dam­ages against the lying anti-human green
extrem­ists, whose co-founder now says the jury award could finan­cially
dev­as­tate the group.

Let’s hope so. The real goal of these fruit­cakes is to remove all
human activ­ity from vast swatches of the rural West (turn­ing most of
it back into an untended desert), where­upon they seem to imag­ine only
they and their clos­est friends will be handed pic­nic permits.

And the Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­sity is actu­ally among the more
liti­gious of these gangs; a third of its $3 mil­lion income in 2003
came from court awards and set­tle­ments, accord­ing to the Journal.

Live by the sword, die by the sword?
[End the War on Free­dom]

bq. Jim Carl­ton of the Jour­nal reports the Chilton case “if upheld, could spark a legal upris­ing by ranch­ers against envi­ron­men­tal­ists, experts say.” The law­suit “has given hope to a lot of ranch­ing fam­i­lies,” agrees C.B “Doc” Lane, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Ari­zona Cat­tle Grow­ers’ Association.

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Mary Ruwart at LewRockwell.com -

The Law Most Likely to Kill You — FDA reg­u­la­tions cause
unnec­es­sary deaths, by the mil­lions. [lew] [End the War on Free­dom]

bq. The death toll from los­ing half of our inno­va­tions from 1962 to 2003 is some­where between 4 and 16 mil­lion peo­ple depend­ing upon the assump­tions used. Adding the 4.7 mil­lion deaths due to an extra 10 years of devel­op­ment time sug­gests that as many as one out of three peo­ple who died of dis­ease since 1962 may have done so needlessly.

Dra­matic Oppor­tu­nity. What con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal fig­ure will make a bet­ter sub­ject for a grand his­tor­i­cal drama than Karl Rove?
Not Nixon: there’s not much you can do with such a small, petty, angry man, cor­nered at last. Not Rea­gan, pass­ing long, hazy days in the Oval Office, schem­ing to get an extra choco­late chip cookie. Not Clin­ton: there’s just no drama in good gov­ern­ment tar­nished by per­sonal weak­ness; not even Gib­bon could find the story line though the third cen­tury of the Empire offers plenty of Clin­tonesque exam­ples. And not Bush, who seems to lack either the weight or the aware­ness you’d need for drama.
At Har­vard, I once played King­maker with an under­grad­u­ate woman whose ances­tor was Richard Neville. [Mark Bern­stein]

It’s worth point­ing out that regard­less of what any­one may think of Clin­ton as a good sub­ject for his­tor­i­cal drama, he actu­ally was the sub­ject for a com­edy.

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Scott Granne­man -

Skype secu­rity and pri­vacy con­cerns — Mr. Granne­man agrees with me
that eBay’s pur­chase of Skype bodes ill for Skype’s secu­rity. I’d
wager they’ll put a back-door in their encryp­tion real soon.
bq.
That’s bad enough, but now Skype is going to be owned by eBay. I know
that lots of peo­ple just loooove eBay. I use them myself, most
recently to enhance my Li’l Abner comics col­lec­tion, but I’m care­ful
about the infor­ma­tion I give them. Why? Well, it seems that there are
three kinds of com­pa­nies: those that fight for cus­tomers’ pri­vacy in
the face of the demands of law enforce­ment; those that require some
sort of offi­cial, constitutionally-mandated doc­u­ments — like, oh, say,
a war­rant or sub­poena — before hand­ing over cus­tomer info to the cops;
and eBay.

Think I’m being a lit­tle harsh on eBay? At the Cyber­Crime 2003
con­fer­ence, Joseph E. Sul­li­van, Direc­tor of Com­pli­ance and Law
Enforce­ment Rela­tions for eBay,

had this to say to a group of law enforce­ment offi­cials:

“I know from inves­ti­gat­ing eBay fraud cases that eBay has prob­a­bly the
most gen­er­ous pol­icy of any inter­net com­pany when it comes to shar­ing
infor­ma­tion. We do not require a sub­poena except for very lim­ited
cir­cum­stances. We require a sub­poena when we need the finan­cial
infor­ma­tion from the site, credit card info or some­times IP
infor­ma­tion. … So, that really opens the door for us. That means
that what our pol­icy is that if you are law enforce­ment agency you can
fax us on your let­ter­head to request infor­ma­tion: who is that beyond
the seller ID, who is beyond this user ID. We give you their name,
their address, their e-mail address and we can give you their sales
his­tory with­out a sub­poena. … We will prob­a­bly tell you too that you
might want to get a sub­poena because we are look­ing for credit card
info and you ask that. … We also do other things to facil­i­tate your
inves­ti­ga­tion by look­ing and doing some searches around on our own,
typ­i­cally to see if there are some other user ID’s asso­ci­ated with
that thing. … We are doing a lot of work with law enforce­ment
agencies.”

[End the War on Free­dom]

As I’ve men­tioned <a href=“http://radio.weblogs.com/0100205/2005/09/08.html#a3542>before, Skype’s closed source already makes it com­pletely inse­cure. The pur­chase by eBay actu­ally has no effect on its (lack of) security.