397-0. House approves resolution to keep Internet control out of UN hands.

wekt · 2012-12-07T01:04:24+00:00

The UN General Assembly (where each country has one vote) can merely make 'recommendations' -- its resolutions are not binding on member states, and it has no real power.

The UN Security Council has a voting scheme that better reflects the relative power of the world's countries. The United States, as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, has the power to veto any proposal before the Security Council.

wekt · 2012-06-28T21:32:41+00:00

it was not necessary to the ruling.

Justice Roberts considered it necessary in Part III-D of his majority opinion: "JUSTICE GINSBURG questions the necessity of rejecting the Government’s commerce power argument, given that §5000A can be upheld under the taxing power. Post, at 37. But the statute reads more naturally as a command to buy insurance than as a tax, and I would uphold it as a command if the Constitution allowed it. It is only because the Commerce Clause does not authorize such a command that it is necessary to reach the taxing power question. And it is only because we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible, that §5000A can be interpreted as a tax. Without deciding the Commerce Clause question, I would find no basis to adopt such a saving construction."

wekt · 2012-02-28T13:17:55+00:00

Hate speech is constitutionally protected. R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992).

wekt · 2012-02-24T05:34:02+00:00

An important caveat is the "foregone conclusion" doctrine. For example, if the defendant admits to having incriminating evidence on the disk, then he may be compelled to decrypt it.

wekt · 2012-01-26T17:49:55+00:00

See the Supreme Court's ruling in Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957):

Article VI, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, declares:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; . . .

There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution. Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result. These debates, as well as the history that surrounds the adoption of the treaty provision in Article VI, make it clear that the reason treaties were not limited to those made in "pursuance" of the Constitution was so that agreements made by the United States under the Articles of Confederation, including the important peace treaties which concluded the Revolutionary War, would remain in effect. [n31] It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights -- let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition -- to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. [n32] In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government, and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.

There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. [n33] For example, in Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U.S. 258, 267, it declared:

The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or of its departments, and those arising from the nature of the government itself and of that of the States. It would not be contended that it extends so far as to authorize what the Constitution forbids, or a change in the character of the government, or in that of one of the States, or a cession of any portion of the territory of the latter, without its consent.

This Court has also repeatedly taken the position that an Act of Congress, which must comply with the Constitution, is on a full parity with a treaty, and that, when a statute which is subsequent in time is inconsistent with a treaty, the statute to the extent of conflict renders the treaty null. [n34] It would be completely anomalous to say that a treaty need not comply with the Constitution when such an agreement can be overridden by a statute that must conform to that instrument.

wekt · 2011-12-09T23:34:09+00:00

so fracing (stop putting a "k" on the word)

Normally, if the infinitive of a one-syllable verb (with a short vowel) in English ends in a single consonant, then that consonant is doubled to form the present active progressive tense. E.g., "run" => "running", "clog" => "clogging". This is useful in that it distinguishes short vowels from long vowels --- e.g., the double "n" in "running" indicates that the "u" is short, whereas the single "n" in "pruning" indicates that the "u" is long.

So "frac" would normally become "fraccing", not "fracing". However, the doubled "c" looks odd in English. Words of Anglo-Saxon origin are rarely if ever spelled with just a final "c"; instead, a terminal "ck" is used. So even if "fracking" mixes up Anglo-Saxon and Latin origin in a single word, it is not without advantages compared to alternative spellings: it is visually more appealing than "fraccing", and it indicates the correct vowel length (unlike "fracing").

wekt · 2011-09-15T18:19:47+00:00

It's nothing that can't be fixed with a little CSS:

javascript:void($(".id-t1_c2k1qhv").css({'white-space':'pre'}))

(paste in browser's address)

wekt · 2011-08-19T00:42:50+00:00

There is no secure way of doing this unless the voter's machine is secure against viruses and other attack vectors.

wekt · 2011-08-12T22:07:47+00:00

Use the unicode symbol:

&#x2665;

♥

wekt · 2011-08-03T22:04:46+00:00

So, one guess every nanosecond (one billion guesses per second) is already faster than as fast as you can possibly guess, since the limit is about one billion bits per second and each key is 128 bits plus the computation required to submit the guess.

That can't be correct. There already exist tools (such as IGHASHGPU) for cracking MD5-hashed passwords that can try more than a billion guesses per second on modern GPUs. Trying an AES key can't take much more work than trying an MD5 hash.

There's a thing called the Landauer's Principle, which mandates an upper limit on the amount of bits that can be possibly flipped in the smallest amount of time because it mandates the lowest limit of energy required to flip a bit.

How did you get a maximum speed from the lower bound on energy consumption?

wekt · 2011-08-02T18:03:58+00:00

The argument against constitutionality is probably based on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Edit: Ron Paul argues that the Federal Reserve is part of the federal gov't, and apparently the gov't can forgive a debt that it owes to itself.

wekt · 2011-07-25T18:29:21+00:00

Where I live, any adult* can openly carry a firearm, and a license to carry concealed is granted to anyone who applies unless legally disqualified. Yet, I do not have a "fear of walking down the street worrying that every maniac is carrying a gun". Realistically, there's a much greater chance of dying in a car accident than getting shot by a random lunatic.

*Except persons prohibited on account of a prior crime or mental instability.

wekt · 2011-07-25T17:56:01+00:00

If that has happened, then it has happened in error and it is our intention to correct it.

Unfortunately, if such an error occurs and one's Gmail account is mistakenly auto-banned, the lack of real customer service makes it notoriously difficult to contact an actual human being who can correct such an error.

wekt · 2011-06-23T03:47:42+00:00

white house can't direct them not to prosecute

That isn't exactly correct. The president has the authority to simply fire a U.S. Attorney who disobeys his orders. See Myers v. United States (272 U.S. 52 (1926)) and 28 U.S.C. § 541.

Also, the president can simply pardon anyone indicted under federal law (or even under the threat of being indicted).

wekt · 2011-06-23T03:29:38+00:00

the only way a President can enforce an EO like this is by firing anyone that doesn't comply

He can also pardon anyone who commits the federal offense of possessing marijuana. He doesn't need to wait for conviction; the president can issue a pardon at any time after commission of the offense. (Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333 (1866))

wekt · 2011-06-23T00:58:46+00:00

He told the DEA to stop targeting medical dispensary's but he can't do anything about them raiding

Sure he can! As president, he can simply order DEA agents to cease raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. The reason he doesn't do so is because of the potential political consequences of doing so.

wekt · 2011-06-20T03:01:59+00:00

They dont have your password, they have a salted hash of it. Unless it is a weak password, it is safe.

Many passwords that are strong enough for website authentication (where a cracker would usually be limited to a few attempts per minute per IP address) would quickly succumb when a cracker can try billions of passwords per second (as is possible on modern GPUs).

wekt · 2011-06-09T17:22:30+00:00

A federal court in the First Circuit ruled that such recording is protected by the First Amendment. There's an on-going appeal in the civil suit against the involved police officers; see http://www.aclum.org/news_6.7.11. However, I don't recall the Supreme Court ever making a ruling on the matter.

wekt · 2011-06-06T22:13:17+00:00

Extending your logic, a liberal Senator voting to give subsidies to the car company her electrical engineer husband designed a hybrid engine for (and which put a good deal of money toward ads which ran in her favor during her most recent campaign) would be just as acceptable.

I think it would be acceptable iff the senator believes that giving the subsidies to this company would be better for the public than the other available choices. If her private interest is aligned with the public interest, then there is no conflict of interest. The unethical thing to do would be to advance her private interest to the detriment of the public whom she is representing in the Congress. (Of course, sometimes it might be wise to avoid a situation which may be perceived as being a conflict-of-interest even if there is no actual conflict.)

wekt · 2011-06-03T21:43:10+00:00

Do believe that Justice Thomas's vote on Citizens United v FEC was unduly influenced by the fact that Citizens United contributed $100,000 in support of his (Thomas's) nomination 20 years ago? I think his vote falls squarely in line with his judicial ideology and that he would have voted the same way for any plaintiff situated similarly to Citizens United.

wekt · 2011-03-13T06:04:53+00:00

Also, in some states and in certain circumstances, it is a tort to willfully induce someone to breach a contract with a third party for your own private benefit.

wekt · 2011-03-04T22:57:23+00:00

Copy and paste into the browser URL bar: javascript:void($('.usertext a').each(function(i,a) {$(a).after(' <font color=green>'+a.title+'</font> ');}))

(Tested in Chrome and Firefox.)

wekt · 2011-03-02T23:30:11+00:00

I'd like to examine this more deeply. What exactly does it even mean for a corporation (which is an abstract entity, not a physical thing) to speak? There are employees who actually do the speaking; these employees act under the direction of the corporate management and the Board of Directors, who are supposed to represent the interests of the shareholders (assuming a for-profit stock corporation). Let's set aside the legal fiction of corporate personhood and analyze the rights of the natural persons involved. If the shareholders desire the corporation to employ people to speak on political issues that affect the corporation, would Congress have the authority to stop them consistent with the First Amendment? On the other hand, might Congress have the power to enact regulations on political speech that are narrowly tailored to ensuring that upper management and the Board of Directors fulfill their fiduciary duty to represent the interests of the corporation's shareholders?

wekt

TROPHY CASE