Day: May 10, 2014

19th Century legal minds encounter 21st Century tech inside SCOTUS

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Scalia thinks HBO is broadcast free-to-air like a local TV channel

One U.S. Supreme Court justice referred to Netflix as “Netflick.” Another seemed not to know that HBO is a cable channel. A third appeared to think most software coding could be tossed off in a mere weekend.

These and other apparent gaffes by the justices during oral arguments have became a source of bemused derision, as tech aficionados, legal experts and others have taken to social media, blogs, YouTube and other outlets to proclaim the justices black-robed techno-fogeys.

“Everyone who’s anyone inside that courtroom is most likely an incompetent Luddite,” Sarah Jeong, a 25-year-old Harvard Law School student, wrote on her personal blog following a recent Supreme Court argument dealing with a copyright dispute over TV online startup Aereo.

When it comes to cutting-edge technology, Jeong told Reuters: “Mom and Dad are the Supreme Court.”

Parker Higgins, a 26-year-old digital rights advocate who works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, spliced together audio of the Aereo argument for comic effect and posted it on a sound cloud and at YouTube.

About a minute long, it’s a compilation of the justices’ references to “the cloud,” highlighting some misuse of terminology and uncertainty about how the technology works.

“Sometimes it’s just amusing and sometimes it’s really troubling,” Higgins said…

The court, via spokeswoman Kathy Arberg, declined comment on the recent criticism…

RTFA for the anachronistic examples, funny enough, scary enough on their own. Reuters rolls on into a tag predictably riddled with sophistry. Assuring everyone that final decisions will be tidy.

I wish I was confident that tidy equates to useful.

If you hadn’t noticed – the Global War on Drugs is a failure

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LSE War on Drugs

The war on drugs must end and the battle to change international drug policies must begin, says a new report from the London School of Economics.

Five Nobel Prize-winning economists signed off on the 84-page report entitled Ending the Drug Wars: Report of the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy authored by leading drug policy experts and supported by political figures from around the world calling for drug law reform.

The authors offer compelling evidence that achieving a “drug-free world” based solely on a prohibitionist model is an expensive and wasted effort. According to John Collins, co-ordinator of LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project and editor of the report, the drug policy experts’ recommendations show how the war on drugs is a failure requiring a “major rethink of international drug policies…”

Based on rigorous economic and social analyses of primarily the U.S., Latin America, West Africa and Asia, the authors urge that global resources shift from prosecution and imprisonment to more “effective evidence-based polices” such as harm reduction, treatment and public health strategies. Similar recommendations are suggested for Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

The report also says the drug war epidemic has produced “negative outcomes and collateral damage.” Prohibition helps push illicit drug prices up exorbitantly compared to what they would cost in a legally controlled market.

Current policies have helped push the black market drug trade to as much as $300 billion, and the 40 per cent of the world’s nine million prison inmates are jailed for drug-related offences — a figure that jumps to 59 per cent in the U.S. Moreover, between 70 and 85 per cent of American inmates are in need of substance abuse treatment.

The report emphasizes that while prohibition holds some value in decreasing drug dependence, the harm to society is gravely outweighed due to violence, government corruption and collateral damage associated with the drug war, especially in drug producing countries like Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.

Dr. Benedikt Fischer…thinks prohibition is an outdated weapon to fight the modern war on drugs. “The advocates of prohibition had about a century to prove that their approach is actually effective and we’re still waiting for the positive evidence,” he says. “I think it’s fair game to now say, look let’s give some alternative approaches a chance and on an evidence base, not based on ideology.”

RTFA if you need a little more depth on the study and its conclusions.

Read the study itself if you need a bit more ammunition in the battle for reason versus ignorance – with the idiots in charge of the asylum we call government.