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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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January 6th, 2009

unixronin: Rodin's Thinker (Thinker)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 12:20 pm

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."

— James Madison (likely), Federalist No. 62, 1788

There is a long-standing legal principle in the US and the UK that ignorance of the law is no defense against the law.  You cannot be excused for violating a law merely because you didn't know of its existence or provisions.  But can that principle stand any longer when the body of laws and regulations with the force of law has grown so voluminous, so complex, and so internally inconsistent that no-one, not even lawyers and judiciaries who have spent their entire lives studying it, are or can be familiar with all of it?  This question becomes doubly true when the government shows itself willing to knowingly entrap otherwise law-abiding citizens into technical violations of laws they may not even know the existence of.

The United States is founded upon the principle that its people are free, and that government exists to serve the people.  Encircling and binding them up with laws in such vast numbers that no-one can keep track of them does not seem to further that end, especially when so many of those laws — as we have clearly seen recently in the domino collapse of the financial sector — do not accomplish their ostensible purpose of protecting the public good.  Those banking institutions were all ostensibly regulated, for our protection; but the regulation was worthless, because in practice the regulators worked for the benefit of the financial institutions they were supposed to be regulating, not for the public good.

unixronin: GENERIC ICON (black and white) (ICON)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 08:05 pm

.....I said, the sky is falling!

... I said, the SKY is FALLING!

... Hello?  Sky?  YO!  SKY!  TALKIN' TO YOU HERE!  I'm WAITING TO SEE some FALLING HERE!

Or, not.  Rumors and galloping hysteria to the contrary, the sky is NOT falling.  LiveJournal is NOT shutting down.  It's not even ceasing US operations.  The garbled rumor about 20 out of 28 US employees being fired is just that — a garbled rumor, and from a gossip blog not renowned for journalistic accuracy at that.  Twelve total jobs, split between the US and Moscow, have been cut.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

You may now all return to running in circles, screaming and shouting.  Carry on.

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