EULAlyzer™ 1.0

Analyze license agreements for interesting words and phrases.

Nice idea!

EULAlyzer

Rattle wrote:
The best source I've found for the current West Wing floor-plan come from the Washington Post. Depending on which version is correct, Miers has an office either right down the hall from the president or on the south-west corner of the second floor. Both are prime locations.

This is an interesting post. I wonder what the date on the first picture is?

RE: White House Floor-Plan

I am sorry to inform all interested parties that Red Rose Stories is a DEAD site.

The FBI has suceeded in closing me down.

I am being charged with 'OBSCENITIES' and face charges for having posted fantasy stories.

They are trying to say fantasy stories are illegal.

The men in black (FBI) took ALL of my computer equipment, and many of my diskettes,
and have access to ALL my files and site information. They came when I was NOT home and seized my belongings, I had no choice, and no recourse.

BoingBoing seems to be providing coverage of a number of cases. This one is key. My understanding is that the stories on this site were, ehm, perhaps a bit over the top. Certainly not the sort of writing one would recommend in polite company, or even, perhaps, in impolite company.

Nevertheless, they are just stories. They aren't pictures. They aren't movies. They are written stories. They are someone's thoughts. If it can be a crime to publish these stories then the only appropriate name for that sort of crime is thoughtcrime. This person's house has been raided for sharing inappropriate thoughts.

Ask your Republican friends who claim to advocate a strict constructionalist jurisprudence to explain how this is consistent with a literal reading of the first amendment.

The Bush Administration's porn war has begun

Professor Laurence Tribe has recently made some interesting observations on the usefulness of analogies from the physical sciences in understanding constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court. [FN1] Tribe's observations are made more valuable by his good sense in not pushing them too far: he does not suggest that constitutional law is "just like" quantum mechanics, or that lawyers can derive concrete legal answers from the paradigms of modern physics. Rather, he suggests that just as classical constitutional thought was strongly influenced by Newtonian paradigms of clockwork precision, regularity, and objectivity, [FN2] so modern constitutional thought might gain from an appreciation of post-Newtonian concepts like "observer effects" and the ability of objects to influence one another at a distance by distorting the very fabric of the space they occupy.

Tribe makes a number of interesting points, but he does not discuss one aspect of modern science that seems particularly applicable to current constitutional debate. That aspect is "chaos" theory, invented by mathematicians and widely used by scientists, which has to do with the discovery that even seemingly simple and determinate systems are capable of displaying apparently random-and genuinely unpredictable- behavior.

This sounds interesting...

chaos.PDF (application/pdf Object)

In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party's own whiny Beltway intellectuals.

Slate agrees with my recent take on Miers. Orin Kerr disagrees reasonably, but I think Kerr should give it a week or two and then see what it looks like.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Gods v. Geeks:

The Republican-controlled Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure Wednesday that would set standards for the military's treatment of detainees, a response to the Abu Ghraib scandal and other allegations that U.S. soldiers have abused prisoners.
"Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions," he said, referring to the international agreement on the treatment of prisoners of war. "Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death.
"But every one of us -- every single one of us -- knew and took great
strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were
better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace
ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."

'Bout god damn time. You cannot chunk the Geneva Convention claiming its quaint without replacing it with a better standard and expect people to "just trust you" while huge abuse scandals are going down.

Senate sets standards on detainees / Lawmakers defy Bush to overwhelmingly OK McCain bill in response to Abu Ghraib

Reid, who was raised in a small Nevada mining town and worked his way through law school, alluded in an interview to Miers' struggles as a young woman working part time to pay for her education after her father was incapacitated by a stroke.

"She overcame difficult family circumstances to become the managing partner of a successful 400-lawyer Dallas law firm," Reid said.

Elonka offered this link on Miers, which is frankly the first really positive comment I've seen on her that didn't involve her religion.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: What this Democrat sees in nominee

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

These people are silly. Threatening to leave the DNS system just because you don't think you have enough influence? What do you want them to do differently? Have you made reasonable proposals that have been ignored? Don't you realize that if you can leave the DNS system so can I, and so your influence cannot be coercive?

It is inevitable that the DNS system is going to fragment... I'm all for it. We ought to start talking about what kinds of tools we need to support multiple roots on one computer, and put an end to this government puffery as well as vile sitefinder once and for all.

EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse

I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists. Across a broad spectrum of issues they want to move the law in a radically more conservative direction, ultimately threatening our freedom.

Wow, this is entertaining. Its a nice website but it doesn't seem to have any high profile supporters. Coming out against religious conservatives may be suicide even for Democrats in most areas.

On the subject of nice websites, in my search for a place in America's political system I thought I'd go through Wikipedia's list of American party factions and see if there are any that I find agreeable. I found two.

The Democratic Freedom Caucus promotes "individual liberty, constitutional democracy, and social responsibility." Look at this crummy website, and compare it to the vast "we're not commies, really" progessive movement and the Democratic Leadership Council, (an authoritarian group I like to call "Soccer Mom Democrats" because they are always looking to "protect" you with rules and taxes). Pause to reflect on how marginalized actual freedom is in our political system.

The only other group is the Main Street Republicans, who are so marginalized in their party that they are referred to as "Republicans in name only" by everyone else in their tent. They are clearly also unable to afford a decent web designer. (Of course, it could be a lot worse.) They say: the message of the Partnership is "one of quiet diplomacy, rather than wedge politics." Isn't that refreshing?

Honorable mention goes to the Libertarian Party's Republican conspiracy, the Republican Liberty Caucus, but I'm no longer enamored with the philosophy that government is incapable of accomplishing useful things. I became interested in them because "withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." Unfortunately I think their on paper utopianism doesn't stand scrutiny.

DefCon Blog

""The United States has lost control of their budget at a time when racking up deficits has been authorized without any control (from Congress)," Breton said.

"We were both disappointed that the management of debt is not a political priority today," he added."

(ouch!)

Greenspan tells France that the US has LOST CONTROL