How Tech-Savvy Will the Next President Be? 715
CorinneI writes "We've got our candidates. We know their positions on the major issues of the day — healthcare, the Iraq war, the economy, yada, yada, yada. But Senators McCain and Obama will also have to be concerned with tech issues. Where do they stand on Net neutrality, patent protection, piracy, broadband, privacy, and H1B visas? Do their campaign positions match up with their voting records and public statements? Here's how they stack up on the big five tech issues of the day."
What about the 2nd? (Score:4, Interesting)
Leave that to the future (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:does it really matter (Score:4, Interesting)
To be closer to your analogy, one might say "Look at my new Desert Eagle", and McCain would say: "naw, I'm going to the beach today."
Lessig (Score:5, Interesting)
On the question of privacy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Broadband Access (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a pretty hypocritical attitude, considering that one way or the other, taxpayers and shareholders (ie. other people) have paid for your broadband.
I seem to pay a bill each month... If it's being subsidized, I didn't ask for that. Tell me where to vote so that it's not subsidized, and I'll do it. If that makes it too expensive, then it's too expensive.
Re:Does the President have to know about this stuf (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, I think McCain grew up with Alan Turing's Dad so...
I mean, is there really any doubt on which one is more "tech savvy"? If their ages don't make it completely obvious, look at Obama's website, his government transparency (available online), and his simple familiarity with the issues.
A 47 year old recent Constitutional law professor (universities tend to have a couple uses for the inter-tubes) whose campaign uses the Internet as its central tool vs a 72 year old guy who has been in the Legislature since 640K was enough for anyone?
Obama at Google (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8 [youtube.com]
Now, if he could just get some decent web developers.
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/2341201&from=rss [slashdot.org]
Re:What about the 2nd? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's not forget [civiliansdown.com]
Get to the real issues (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we are getting very close to the time when the government as it has become will need to be reset. Right now we have a two party system where we get pretty much the same no matter who is in power. They treat the population as a huge wallet that they extract money from. Then that money is paid to the lobbies and others that paid to get the officials elected. Sure there is some it spent to placate the masses, but bread and circuses only last so long.
The problem is we have no one to blame but ourselves. We created a system that has systematically evolved politicians into the sub-species that they have become. They are able to spew sound bites without ever doing anything concrete and are able to promise everyone exactly what they want to hear. At this point we are unable to elect someone that has the actual skills that are needed to lead this country the way it should be led. Once in power they will tax and spend just like they always have no matter who is in power.
Personally I think our only hope at the moment is to keep any single party from getting both congress and the White House at the same time. At least when they are held by different parties it prevents massive sweeping changes from being enacted. If a single party does control everything then it will be a sign that things are going to get really bad. There will be no stopping them from doing whatever they hell they want.
Regardless get ready for $10.00 a gallon gasoline and rampant inflation over the next four years. And I suspect we will start to see massive famines across the world and possibly in this country. And the endless debate that the other party caused all this.
McCain Never IM'ed (Score:2, Interesting)
Which of McCain or Obama is more likely to say "newfangled"?
To which of these two people, the guy who remembers silent movies in theaters firsthand, or the guy who went to Columbia University while the kermit terminal app was being developed there, is going to recognize technology opportunities and pitfalls? And which is the guy who's letting an AT&T lobbyist run his campaign, because he doesn't know (or care, really) the first thing about technology?
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if McCain does or does not accept cash for votes, but I do know that if finding evidence of bribery were as easy as checking out income tax records, all the lobby groups in Washington would be out of business.
I'm voting Libertarian (Score:3, Interesting)
If all the newspapers said McCain was going to lose and a vote for him was wasted, would he have a chance of winning? The Libertarians are on the ballot in 49 states. Their views are as important as the Republicrats, if not more so.
Are the Greens even running a Presidential candidate this year? If so their candidate's stance on tech should be covered as well.
Saame on you.
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:5, Interesting)
And Jay Rockefeller, D (WV), is pushing telecom immunity because he truly believes the Telco's were the innocent victims here?
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, when John McCain's egg gets cracked, there's gonna be a huge mess. He can only hide behind the "I'm a hero because I crashed my plane in the jungle and then made videos for the Viet Cong" angle for so long. Sooner or later, some journalist is going to grow a set and actually do more than a cursory glance at McCain's history. Then, there's gonna be much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Republicans and corporate lobbyists.
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be pointed out that other communications companies such as Time Warner give much more to BO's campaign [fecwatch.org] then At&T have given to McCains.
Neither candidate is free from big Comm clutches.
Re:What about the 2nd? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I think would work here, and remain constitutional, would be to limit strictly the TYPE of firearms legaly owned, limit those further to licenced persons, and their carying in public to authorized citizens only. (the constitution provides owning handguns for the efficint creation of a militia, and says nothing about hunting, home security, or any other rights) If you're not active, or in some way military trained, or work for a local molitia (AKA police) or a private and legally licenced militia (private security) then you have no constitutionally protected rights toa firearm.
Beyond limitation of ownership, unless in uniform, and wearing a badge consistent with posession of a loaded gun, police should have loosened rules for being able to shoot at armed suspects. Having a concealed weapon, in any way, unless visibly identified as someone authorised to do so, should allow police leniancy for opening fire on you sooner. A gun in your hand is all they should need to empty their clip at you. If criminals are aware of this increased risk of death, they'll stop carying guns.
The big deal however is not even limiting crime, but limiting accidental deaths and crimes of passion. The bulk of gun releated deaths in the USA fall into these 2 categories. Take a look at statistics in Canada, clearly showing that as household gun ownership increases, so do gun deaths, and in areas where guns in homes are rare, the drop in accidental and other gun related injuries is very low. Homicides do seem to remain consistent. Suicides however are more than 10 times the number of homicides, and keep in mind, 75% of homicides are people that know each other (wives killing husbands, or their lovers, etc)
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about the 2nd? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me tell you, having lived in the mountains in NY and CT, and also 15 years in the PeeDee (cental SC), southern rednecks don't hold a candle to the level of redneck that a NY hick stives to obtain.
As for high crime statistics vs control measures, you fail to factor out local racial, poverty, and societal concentrations from your numbers, as well as normalizing for overall crime and drug use levels. DC has the highest crime rate in the country across almost all disciplines of crime, normalizing for that, gun violence in DC is actually low. We need to look at gun control regulation statistics using a larger, and less polluted sample size. Also, gun control laws in DC HAVE lowered gun crime, even though they're still very high. You should have seen it BEFORE the controlls, it's why they were enacted, and they've been hailed as generally successful.
Re:Nothing to see here folks (Score:4, Interesting)
Realize, though, that not every donation is an attempt to curry favor. I donated a few hundred to Obama, and I develop a website for an online travel company, but that doesn't mean Obama is in the pocket of Big Travel or Big Internet. Similarly, if 1000 gas station attendants donate $20 to McCain, that will be logged as $20,000 coming from the oil industry, but don't tell me those attendants are buying influence.
$7 million from the entertainment and computer industries sounds suspicious, but it's not like the RIAA just cut him a seven-figure check. Obama is an inspiring liberal (as opposed to Kerry in '04 and Gore in '00), and he has really strong support amongst Democrats with higher education. This translates to affluent Hollywood actors and Silicon Valley professionals donating and fund-raising on Obama's behalf.
I'm not saying Obama is going to turn a blind eye to his financial backers; nobody is ignorant of where their support is coming from. But when both candidates are refusing money from federal lobbyists (I know Obama is, pretty sure McCain is) and taking it in small amounts from individual contributors, this kind of tallying isn't damning.
Millions of people [huffingtonpost.com] have donated to Barack's campaign, mostly in small denominations. How much more legit can hard-money donations from private individuals get? What, should only people who don't have employment be able to donate?
Re:What about the 2nd? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention that in the early US history, it was routinely upheld that states had the right to regulate weapons (the issue didn't come to a federal level until much later).
US v. Cruikshank [wikipedia.org] and Presser v. Illinois [wikipedia.org] said that the 2nd Amendment applied only to the federal government. However, these cases pre-dated incorporation of the Bill of Rights via the 14th Amendment against the states (see below).
However, Presser v. Illinois stated that there is a limit upon state restriction of firearms ownership:
It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States, and in view of this prerogative of the general government, as well as of its general powers, the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security, and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government. But, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration do not have this effect.
However, Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove [cmu.edu] disposed of this as "dicta quoted out of context", and the US Supreme Court denied cert for the appeal.
Items generally restricted were weapons designed to be easy to conceal -- pistols, dirks, cane swords, etc.
One of these (Aymette v. State of TN [cmu.edu]), was cited by the Court in US v. Miller [wikipedia.org] -- relying on the phrase "for the common defense" in the state constitution. However, that particular phrase was explicitly rejected by the US Senate during the debate of the Bill of Rights, as it may have been enough for some of the ratifying states to reject it.
Often there were commonsense exceptions -- in Arkansas, they left an exception for those who were "on a journey", for example.
It sounds like "common sense", until you understand the reason behind it and similar laws in the South. We had the same exception in Texas law, but it was really code for "if your skin is the right color". For almost a century, state and local law enforcement used it as a discretionary method to enforce the prohibition against carrying weapons against people they didn't like. When anti-gun police chiefs in Texas started enforcing the prohibition against the white majority in the large cities, popular support for a non-discretionary CHL law grew until it was passed in 1995.
An interesting piece of trivia: Texas Governor Ann Richards publicly threatened a veto of a CHL law if it was sent to her desk. That act was widely credited as a substantial contributor to her defeat in the subsequent 1994 election. The winner of that election was George W. Bush, whose only prior political asset was his name.
I think there could be a legitimate argument made that the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate weapons without constitutional amendment (it depends on the reading), but you'd be hard-pressed to support that line of argument in relation to the right of states to do so.
It depends on the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Although the authors of the 14th Amendment explicitly said it was intended to apply the first 8 amendments in the Bill of Rights to the states, the Supreme Court declined to interpret it that way, and has instead been incorporated the Bill of Rights piece-meal, as the cases are brought before them.
At the moment, the
Re:So.... Why are there only two candidates? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a result, you must either be for abortion rights, gun control, socialized medicine, gay rights, environmental protection, and non-interventionism, or be against all these things. Either way, you are out of necessity for more government regulation to promote your agenda, because if you don't pass a law on a given issue your opponents will. It's essentially a zero sum legislative proliferation game. If you would rather vote for a party that supports what you truly believe you are told you are throwing your vote away. So most people pick the issue that is most important to them, and ally themselves with the party they that agrees with them on that issue.
But the truth is it's not any better anywhere else, if you ask me. In some ways, the best political situation one can realistically expect is deadlock. Consensus can be a dangerous thing, because more often than not it represents an agreement that the population needs some new additional regulation or control for its own good (see, e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act or the Homeland Security Act, both of which enjoyed an broad bipartisan support).
The question is no longer whether new regulations are necessary, but rather which of two opposing viewpoints you hold as to what that regulation should be.
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This isn't Insightful.. It's disgusting... (Score:1, Interesting)
The only bad part your tax dollars (yen) may go to a candidate you do not support.