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 Sunday, April 6, 2003
Margaret does a wonderful job discussing my hopes and fears for the US, but from a British perspective. 3:01:02 AM 
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A naturalized citizen is held in a maximum security prison without being charged with a crime. Nothing will be done about him until May at the earliest. This sure makes me feel secure. Apparently ANYONE can be held in a maximum security prison with only 1 hour of exercise time a day for as long as the government wants by calling them a material witness. In this case, a gag order prevents anyone from actually saying WHY he has been arrested and his house searched. There are no public records. At the moment he is invisible. Luckily he has well-placed friends at Intel or we might never have heard anything about him at all. See, the Bill of Rights only apply someone accused of a crime. Apparently the new laws allow the government to hold someon for as long as they want if the citizen has not been accused of a crime; if he is only a material witness for someone who might have committed a crime. What a world where a murderer is protected by the Bill of Rights but a witness is not! Expect this to be increasingly abused as will be the 'enemy combatant' approach. It holds great intimidation factor for any citizen of the United States. 1:33:33 AM
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Terminators of Endearment, or Pride and Extreme Prejudice. IIRC, this started when Eric Flint remarked that his and his wife's taste overlapped in two and two places only: (i) Jane Austen novels, and (ii) Terminator movies.
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: Terminator meets Pride and Prejudice.
Adrian [Hon] sez, "Brenda W. Clough and Ryk Erik Spoor have come up with the ingenious idea of a Terminator/Pride and Prejudice crossover, and are currently writing sections on rec.arts.sf.written. Possibly the funniest thing I have read this year."
"Indeed," said the man (whom Patience could not help but think of as made of clockwork, though he manifestly was something far stranger), "I speak of these things not merely because of the way that I am made, though indeed a machine should do that which it is made to do, but because I have found that I have developed, through our many conversations, a feeling of that which is proper, both within the bounds of your society and without; and being that I am, here, a gentleman, I find that I am also bound to behave as a gentleman would, and indeed, Lady Patience, I must warn you that this Mr. Connor is a man of less than sterling character."
[Semi-Daily Journal]
Read the story of Terminator 2 if it had been written by Jane Austen. It is a really fun lark and quite interesting to read. This could open up a whole genre of stories: Die Hard and Jane Austen, XXX and Jane Austen, etc, 12:50:14 AM
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Super State-Level DMCAs Continued. The Massachusetts Committee on Criminal Justice held hearings yesterday on House Bill No. 2743 (pdf), "legislation to establish a crime of illegal internet and broadband access and establishing penalties therefor". Derek Slater has notes. John Palfrey of the Berkman Center at Harvard testified at the hearing about how there are already plenty of laws criminalizing theft, but this new bill will cause many problems with all kinds of technologies. Matthew Morse also attended and testified... [bIPlog]
The federal DMCA is a bad enough bit of legislation that has already led to some very unforeseen bits of unintended consequences. There is going to be some really awful things to come if all 50 states decide to use what the RIAA writes. Poorly written laws seem to be the norm when it comes to the ability of Industrial Age thinking to deal with Information Age tools. Watching the Media Cartel try to hold back the water breaking through the dike would be kind of fun if the consequences were not so dire. 12:31:26 AM
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