Archive for the 'Law' Category

Climate change and the limits of Canadian sovereignty

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Thesis: Canada is free to enact more stringent climate policies than the United States, but not free to enact less stringent ones.
Argument:

As long as little is being done in the United States, American corporations are not concerned about being made uncompetitive with foreign firms because of climate change policies.
If the United States did adopt a [...]

Enforcing open source licenses

Monday, August 18th, 2008

An American court has ruled in favour of Robert Jacobsen - a man who wrote software for model trains and released it under an open source license. Ignoring the requirement in the license that derivative work credit the original and provide the original code, a commercial company made a product using the code. Under this [...]

Nanomaterial safety

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

When it comes to geological periods of time, our intuitions about how things work cannot be trusted. This is a reflection of the parochial character of many of the heuristic shortcuts in our minds. The same thing applies to the behaviour of objects at a minute scale. For instance, sufficiently tiny machinery is hampered enormously [...]

Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

This collection of essays, edited by Vandana Shiva, varies considerably in tone and degree of novelty. The manifestos themselves seem ham-fisted and loaded with unsupported assertions. It is not that no convincing case can be made for many of the arguments raised; rather, the authors simply choose not to do so. It is an approach [...]

Debt and responsibility

Friday, July 25th, 2008

An article in the New York Times draws further attention to the indebtedness of American consumers: focusing on the degree to which debt is harming the lives of individuals, as well as how the lending practices of firms encourage people to take on more than they can handle. While there is certainly a key regulatory [...]

Re-encrypting WiFi

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Unfortunately, I had to shut down my open wireless network experiment. That is because I found three people within the span of two days who were both (a) criminal and (b) very stupid.
One thing to remember: if you are going to use open wireless networks to download illegal things, make sure you aren’t sharing your [...]