Freedom Dept

Rand Paul is really ticking people off - he thinks America should be the land of the free!

From Reason.com

In fact, isn't Rand Paul a valuable litmus test? I'm not saying that disagreeing with any given politician proves one thing or another about a person, but if you look at the bipartisan list of people who have been screaming themselves purple about the junior senator from Kentucky–Bruni, John McCain, Lawrence O'Donnell, William Kristol, Garrett Epps, Michael Gerson, John Yoo–you quickly detect one important trait in common: They are all reliable apologists for the government exercise of power. While the particular power being championed may vary, and the tenor of the argument will change depending on which political party is exercising it this season, the truism remains that Rand Paul poses a direct challenge to people who get irritated when there's any obstruction between their goals and government's ability to pursue them.

For that and other reasons, Paul is not only the most interesting man in the Senate, but I think the most interesting player in American politics today.

Like I've Been Sayin' - you don't need a full OS in the cloud

From Slashdot 24-Mar-2013:

 "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. ... The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."

In a nutshell, what is Erlang?
Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson. Erlang is available as open source from http://www.erlang.org.

Here is the demo screen for "Zerg", an example of an application the starts an instance of a server in the cloud, using Erlang on Xen, which sends a page and deletes itself, in .6 seconds.  Compare that to 5 minutes for the same thing on Amazon EC2

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Dumber than a bag of rocks

Berkeley Councilman Proposes Email Tax To Fund Postal Service

Hahahahahaha

Update:  And Ars Technica blame Fox News!

WHAT, you think you can do drone strikes in the US?!

From Eric "Good Prosecutorial Discretion" Holder, US Atty General,  March 2013:

“It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States,” Holder replied in a letter yesterday to Paul’s question about whether Obama “has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”

 From Wikipedia:

Posse Comitatus Act

"...Any use of the Armed Forces under either Title 10/Active Duty or Title 10/Reserves at the direction of the President will offend the Constitutional Law also known as Public Law prohibiting such action unless declared by the President of the United States and approved by Congress."

Umm Holder?  HOLDER!  BUELLER?!?!   

Even our president can't authorize drone strikes on US soil against Americans.

(I hope!) 
 

Update:  "It has come to my attention," the letter states "That you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no." - Love, Atty General Eric Holder.

How much worse do prosecutors have to get?

Quinn Norton is Aaron Swartz's partner, and shows the treatment of Americans by our "justice" system.  Is it any wonder that it drove someone who's sensitive to commit suicide?

Should we put up with this?  Is this the America we want?  Ben Franklin was so right.  What do we deserve?

A quote from her moving and heartfelt article:

"We should understand that any alleged crime can become life-ruining if it catches their eyes. Innocence and goodness are only factored in as risks to their case. This is the system that we, as citizens, have agreed to."

We should remember that Aaron was only accused of downloading scholarly articles, and previously writing that he thought they should be free.  I think this pretty well established as fact.

Is this how we want to appear to the rest of the world?  As monsters?  Deeply sad.

Update:
From Techdirt: Details Come Out On US Attorneys Withholding Evidence In Aaron Swartz Case
Aaron had broken up (amicably) with Quinn Norton by the time he died, and was in a committed relationship with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.  Who has now laid it out in lavendar (huffpo) how awful our justice employees are treating American Citizens ( so it's the IRS, TSA, Customs, Justice, anyone else?).  In case you're not keeping score, in a nutshell:

1. Stephen Heymann (asst attorney - works for "Toxic"Carmen Ortiz ) threatened Aaron with 7(30?) years in prison
2. Plea bargaining down to months
3. Knowing they had withheld exculpatory evidence - was their case falling apart?
4. Our favorite US attorney (Holder) said Aaron Swarz was "never threatened with more then 3-6 months"

Update 2: Here is Cory Doctorow's article on BoingBoing

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