| Monday
June 9, 2003
Hi Dr.
Pournelle,
Something that a lot of people have been
missing about this case is that this is not
a final decision by any means but just a Temporary Restraining Order or TRO.
A TRO can issue when there is an alleged imminent harm to the person
requesting it. In this case until the court makes a determination as to the
validity of the writers claims the court can order that he not publish so as
to not harm the petitioner if in facts the writings are false. Prior
Restraint? No. The writer was not prevented from writing whatever he wanted.
He is being restrained from continuing to write because the petitioner has
claimed, before a court with jurisdiction, that his writing may not be
truthful or is an invasion of privacy and if allowed to continue would cause
the petitioner irreparable harm.
Ramón A. Santini
Yes, and the distinction is important.
But at the same time it is a kind of restraint. Hard cases make bad law...
I notice you recently said:
"I have always pointed out that no wealthy
republic ever survived long without conscription. ... Britain went to
conscription many times."
Britain has only gone to conscription twice. The
first time was half-way through WWI, and the second was shortly before the
start of WWII.
It is worthy of note, yet so far as I can see
un-noted upon anywhere, that a major factor behind British participation
in Gulf War II is likely to be that Britain has 100% volunteer military
forces while the French and Germans retain conscription.
It is, as you point out much more difficult to drum
up support for overseas military action when conscripts are involved.
During Gulf War I, the French contribution was basically limited to their
Foreign Legion, an entirely volunteer unit.
Jim Mangles
One is often more adventurous with
all volunteer forces. And I should have been more careful to point out
that it's wealth republics with powerful neighbors who need conscription.
But a large standing army was frightening to the Framers and to most of
the US for a very long time.
If we are going to have a big
standing army we probably need conscription if we intend to keep the
republic.
Mr. Mangles writes:
> Britain has only gone to conscription twice.
Silly me. I didn't realize that all those who were
press-ganged into the Royal Navy were actually volunteers. Some of them
were even Americans. Come to think of it, I guess all those villeins that
stood with kings from the Conquest onwards were volunteers as well.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
Subject: RIAA in action.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/
TechTV/techtv_RIAAvsteen030609.html
------------ Roland Dobbins
And from Dan:
I only merely hated the RIAA before, now I truly
despise them. Here is the gist of the story:
IT major at RPI creates software to search RPI
campus dorm networks for any files and index them for students to search
and find.
RIAA finds out about students search engine, sues
claiming he is running a "Napster network" and "hijacked an
academic network" and "installed an emporium for music
trading"
Student settles with RIAA for $12,000, his entire
savings account. Settlement allows student to deny RIAA allegations, have
the case dismissed and all allegations. So the RIAA says he did no wrong
but they are taking his entire life savings? Where did this student break
a law, any law?
Last time I checked that sounded a hell of a lot
like extortion, or am I wrong here?
Story is here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/
TechTV/techtv_RIAAvsteen030609.html
God forbid if Google ever starts to index computer
network shares, the RIAA will sue their asses for creating an
"emporium for music trading" even though its just a damn
database.
-Dan S.
RIAA is evil, and like DMA ought to
be visited by Seven Deadly Plagues.
For another view
see below.
And then
Subject: Rated NC-17
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31089.html
--------- Roland Dobbins
And perhaps I
heard it wrong, but it was certainly from reliable sources; and I never
much believe what NASA says. But :
Saturn V Plans NOT
Thrown Away
"NASA threw away/destroyed the Saturn V
plans" is an urban legend that has been floating around for quite a
while.
>From the sci.space faq available at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/
"WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SATURN V PLANS
Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the
Saturn V blueprints have not been lost. They are kept at Marshall Space
Flight Center on microfilm. The Federal Archives in East Point, GA also
has 2900 cubic feet of Saturn documents. Rocketdyne has in its archives
dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was
initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F-1 and J-2 engine
production to assist in any future re-start.
The problem in re-creating the Saturn V is not
finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's
vintage hardware (like guidance system components), and the fact that the
launch pads and VAB have been converted to Space Shuttle use, so you have
no place to launch from.
By the time you redesign to accommodate available
hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from
scratch with a clean sheet design."
Edmund Hack
It is certainly the case that the
contractors are all pretty well gone. After the Challenger disaster we
tried to get NASA to build a new and improved Shuttle, pointing out that
all the production facilities for the old shuttles were closed off and
many of the subcontractors were out of business, so it would cost less to
build an improved one than to restore a lot of obsolete technology. Even
the Administrator wanted to do it that way.
Of course the NASA bureaucracy
insisted on building the darned thing exactly as it was. But that's NASA.
But in the case of Saturn they
darned well did NOT want ANYONE to be able to build another Saturn which
might threaten Shuttle. I don't know if they threw the plans away -- I
still believe they did -- but I do know for certain they took TWO working
Saturns and the Skylab they could have launched and laid them down as lawn
ornaments and owl roosts. You can see them, the most powerful machines
ever made by mankind, at JSC and the Smithsonian, and you can see the
Skylab at the Smithsonian too. Dan Goldin once told me he wept when he
looked at that Skylab and Saturn at the Smithsonian. They could have been
launched. Instead we built the Space Station, which is what the NASA
bureaucracy wanted.
And just because something is called
a FAQ doesn't make it true. And see below
I think I have put this one up
before, but it's worth referencing again:
Jerry :
A friend forwarded something to me tonight that made
me smile with delight. It's commercial, true, but it hit the little boy
inside me, and I laughed out loud. Make sure your sound is running when
you access the site, and don't do it with a slow dial-up.
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html
There are links to explain this, outline the costs
and the effort, and analyse just what it is. Me, I just watched it five
times in a row with extremely wide-open eyes. And a smile.
John P.
And it's wonderful, if you have
cable modem or some high speed method of accessing it.
Regarding RIAA
Dear Jerry:
I followed the RIAA case against
four college students, all of whom were allowed to settle for amounts
between $12,000 and $17,500. I downloaded and printed out one of the
complaints. Seems these guys appropriated the computer systems of the
universities they were attending and set up a peer-to-peer network music
network comprised entirely of infringed songs for their fellow students.
This is a violation of the NET Act among other laws and the potential
damages for each was as high as 150 million dollars. Attached to the
complaint was a spreadsheet of a thousand songs this one student had
infringed. That's just the civil side. If criminal charges had been
brought, it would have been a felony conviction, a five year sentence and
five million dollars in fines. So, all in all, I'd say that these
individual were allowed to go with a stern warning and a big hit to their
college funds. Yes, this is designed to scare the pants off others tempted
to go the same way. The fact you don't like a law is hardly license to
break it. Not if we lived by the rule of law, and we do. Justice was
tempered with mercy. May others profit from their example because as Rep,
Howard Berman said last year when he came up with that wacko scheme for
authorized cyber vigilantism to solve the problem, "we don't people's
property and give it away just because other people want it."
Sincerely, Francis Hamit
I see your point, but it's the same
point made by the King's governors in 1775 when they remitted some of the
taxes quite legally imposed on the Colonies.
We do not live by rule of law,
because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of
the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even
KNOWS all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a
time of selective enforcement of law.
And the Direct Mail Association, and
RIAA, and others, play games manipulating the laws.
I have some interest in intellectual
property, and I don't condone what was done here; but if we lived by RULE
OF LAW then the students would be fined millions of dollars and jailed for
life. The fact that they were not says quite a bit about the situation,
doesn't it?
Property is itself a creature of
politics and law, and when enough of the governed don't consent, you have
a rather awkward situation. After all, just who is sovereign? When the law
becomes sufficiently unpopular, is it law at all in a republic?
I don't know what the answer to this
situation is. No, we don't take property from its owners and give it to
others just because they want it. Or do we? We are about to give tax
"refunds" to people who pay no taxes at all, which is to say we
are about to take money from those who pay taxes and give it to those who
don't in the guise of, God save us, tax reduction; and to accomplish that
Democratic Party triumph, we are going to raise taxes on those we were not
long ago giving tax relief, all this so that we can be "fair"
and give a tax reduction to those who don't pay any taxes in the first
place.
If that's Rule of Law then I suspect
both John and Sam Adams would plead to have King George back.
On why do they hate us:
Date: June 9, 2003
subject: Why are we hated?
Dear Jerry:
The first
is socialism/communism. From Rousseau onward, there's been a
large group that hated capitalism, and wanted to abolish it. The
justifications keep changing, but the policy stays constant. We've
resisted this trend more than any country on earth, and embraced
capitalism. The result was riches and power. The rest of the
world has favored socialism/communism more than we have, and reaped
weakness and poverty. This earns us envious hatred.
A second
factor is cultural lag. Consider the modern Arab world.
In _The Battles That Changed History_, Fletcher Pratt observed
that if Islam had been designed in a spirit of cold-blooded
rationalism, it would be hard to improve on it as a way of life for
nomadic desert dwellers. But now the Arabs have an exploding
population that lives in cities. Despite the "Muslim
fundamentalist" slogan 'Islam is the answer,' the Koran really
doesn't have much to say about their new way of life.
But Islam
and its laws are the center of Arab culture. Discarding, or
at least radically rethinking the role of Islam would, in a sense, make
them non-Arabs. So they resist. (Note that most of the 9/11
hijackers had spent substantial time in the West, getting educations.
Just being around us disturbed them so much that they embraced
Islamism.)
Today's
Wall Street Journal had a
very good article titled After Empire. The author, a British
doctor, lived in Rhodesia before it was Zimbabwe, as well as other
parts of Africa. Two apposite quotes:
1)
"The young black doctors . . . had an immense number of social
obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever
expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in
their education) and people from their village, tribe and province.
An income that allowed a white to live like a lord . . . scarcely raised
a black above the level of his family. . . . In fact, a salary a
thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient . . . for
their social obligations increased _pari passu_ with their
incomes. . . .
"It
is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper
reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not
long do so when manned by Africans . . . whose relatives would have
condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages
their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same
tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different
cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes."
2) ".
. . I had a Congolese patient who . . . had two degrees in agronomy and
had trained in Toulouse in the interpretation of satellite pictures for
agronomic purposes. . . .
"I
asked him about Mobutu, whom he had known personally.
" 'He
was very powerful,' he said. 'He collected the best witch doctors from
every part of Zaire. Of course, he could make himself invisible;
that was how he knew everything about us. And he could turn
himself into a leopard when he wanted.' "
Of course,
many Western countries have suffered from cultural lag. After the
Great War, the U.S. decided that the policies that had worked in the
19th century should be tried again, despite the fact that they'd already
failed once in the 20th. Somehow, though, we managed to make
a sharp break with the past in the years 1945-55, and we've made other
wrenching adjustments as needed.
Finally,
there's our inconsistencies. Mr. Asteros asks: "Can you
explain to the world that due to certain policies, reasons, or whatever,
instead of getting rid of Saddam 20 years ago, the Iraqi people suffered
for a long period, and finally, without obvious and really defensible
(in a court?) reason, a new war started now?" Sure, easily.
First, the
default, most desired foreign policy of the U.S. is no foreign
policy. From Jamestown and Plymouth onward, our attitude has
tended to be 'You can go to Hell, we're all right.' (This is
sometimes phrased as "We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but
the guardians only of our own.")
When we do
pay attention to foreign policy, we have several different ones
competing with each other. Walter
Russell Mead refers to them as Hamiltonian ("commercial
realism"), Wilsonian ("crusading moralism"), Jeffersonian
("supple pacifism . . . principled but slippery "), and
Jacksonian ("the social, cultural and religious values of . . . the
so-called 'Scots-Irish' ").
Twenty
years ago, Iraq was fighting a war with Iran. The 'pacifist'
thinkers argued that we shouldn't get involved at all, while the
'realist' thinkers were concentrating on the final destruction of the
Soviet Union (OOH! I got a kick out of typing "final destruction of
the Soviet Union"!), and wanted them to bleed each other.
There were
a few Wilsonians who were distressed by the poverty, oppression, and
mass murder in Iraq and the Islamic world generally. They wanted
to intervene, but got outvoted. We didn't care how many
not-particularly-white people Saddam murdered. Then came Sept.
11th, and some
of us reassessed.:
“Two
years ago a friend said we should topple the Taliban to stop them from
blowing up Buddha statues. I said he was nuts, that it wasn’t a
_casus belli_, that we can’t invade every place that has a
lousy government. I couldn’t change his mind, and after
September 11 one of the first things he said to me was 'I told you so.'
He didn’t predict what would happen, but he was right that there was a
problem, and that it was more our business than most people could even
imagine. . . .
“None of
us saw that one coming, but it came our way all the same.
“The
defining feature of the 21st Century is the globalization of chaos.
We have no system to handle all this, and we cannot ignore it much
longer.”
So, we
looked at Iraq, and noted that it had never proven to us that it
had destroyed it's chemical and biological weapons, as it had promised
to do. We noted Saddam's past recklessness, and his involvement
with terrorists, and we decided he had to go. Most of the rest of
the world agreed that Saddam hadn't proved he'd destroyed the forbidden
weapons, but their plan was for the situation to continue.
So we acted, "unilaterally."
I don't
know how long this will go on. Electorates do change their minds,
after all. But what we care about at the moment is eliminating
threats. Sincere regrets if it bothers you, Mr. Asteros, but when
we say we have a problem, we'll tune out anything that doesn't sound
like a solution -- and "Just live with it" is not a solution.
Best,
Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
Regarding Mobutu: few will remember
Maurice Tshombe, who might actually have built some kind of ordered
republic in Katanga if not in the rest of the Congo, only the American
liberal establishment really hated him, and helped destroy him because he
wasn't a liberal democrat.
As to eliminating threats, I agree
that was the motivation for the Iraq war. The question is, will we be more
secure now, and will those who can harm us be more deterred now? And I
would say that there's room for debate on that question. Some people I
respect are holding their breath waiting for a disaster in Iraq. Others
think it will be a breeze. Me, I wish we never went there but now that we
are there we have got to make the best of it; and we will. We're pretty
good at muddling through, and the fact that pumping oil is in the best
interests of both Iraq and the United States doesn't hurt.
Meanwhile,
things move ahead..
New techniques can be abused. Frankly, I'd rather
deal with the Taliban. One can negotiate with a terrorist. I'm starting to
stock some VERY STRONG magnets.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030609-122709-8176r.htm
Aleta
Well we have seen that one coming
for a long time, haven't we?
Jerry,
Looks like the guys at Brookhaven have themselves an
honest to god force field, albeit a bit small. Article is here:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr052803.htm
"Hershcovitch explained the advantages of the
plasma valve: "Unlike traditional valves, a plasma valve has no
moving parts, does not require much maintenance, and establishes a
vacuum-air separation much faster. Also, it is completely nondestructive.
In contrast, existing ultra-fast valves and shutters can cause damage to
machinery when triggered."
When activated, the plasma valve is composed of an
ionized gas, or a gas with charged particles confined by electric and
magnetic fields, that fills an airtight aperture. When the plasma reaches
certain temperature and density parameters, it separates atmospheric
pressure from a vacuum, which must be devoid of pressure. "
-Dan S.
Hmm. I need to think about this one.
Thanks!
And while we are on anomalies:
All,
I find myself wondering if this is really a spoof,
like that Alan Sokal article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
But it is interesting that the Chinese do not seem
to be developing even new fighter planes, much less bombers. To me, this
can only mean that they have no offensive military designs, or at least
none that would cause them to come into conflict with the United States.
Jim
http://www.policyreview.org/jun03/newmyer.html
POLICY REVIEW June+July, 2003
China's Air-Power Puzzle
By Jacqueline A. Newmyer
And it is indeed well worth reading.
And see below
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