Cox Crow

In the Constitution’s Commerce clause, the Congress is granted the power

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

In the same document’s Fifth Amendment, the Federal government may not confiscate property:

nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The 14th Amendment extends this prohibition to the States.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

Both the Commerce clause and the takings clause are perverted by the field of economics. The Constitution grants specific, limited powers, or forbids infringement of the citizen’s rights and privileges. Government’s scope is limited. Economics takes as its subject the full compass of human activity. By interpreting “commerce” as any economic activity, or “public use” as any economic benefit, the intent of the Constitution is reversed: the power of the government becomes unbounded.

It is not solely the Court’s responsibility to interpret, or misinterpret, the Constitution. It is also ours. If we permit our representatives in Congress assembled, or in our State and local assemblies, to engorge the government on our rights, we have only ourselves to blame.

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The Wikipedia discussion of these topics is excellent.

This raised quite a few interesting consumer technology questions. Ordinarily, for example, one needs a credit card (and good credit) to secure a cell phone. “The Amish pay in cash,” explained the merchant, who, along with most Amish-friendly shopkeepers, didn’t want his name used. “We normally ask for a driver’s license for the purpose of identification when we activate cellular service – of course, the Amish don’t have driver’s licenses. They weren’t able to get phones for several months, since we weren’t allowed to open accounts without driver’s licenses. So we had to make a policy change to accommodate them. We ended up asking for another form of identification. But the Amish don’t believe in photography, so we couldn’t get a photo ID. Eventually we told them to get Pennsylvania state IDs without photographs.”

I guess there will be exceptions to the REAL ID Act.

“Look Who’s Talking,” by Howard Rheingold (Wired, vol. 7, no. 01, January 1999), is a very interesting piece on the response of the Amish to technological changes. He writes,

[A] dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church.

They are selective in their choice of tools. Like Luddites, they often characterized as being against the new because it is new. Instead, the Amish ask what effect a particular tool will have on the community.

“When the telephone first came out here, people put them in their homes,” explained Moses. “But they were party lines. One time a woman overheard two other women gossiping about her. She objected. That wasn’t what we wanted for our families or our community, so the bishops met and home telephones were banned.”

I had heard the same story from several other Amish – in fact, this story seemed to be a key part of community mythology. A writer named Diane Zimmerman Umble, who grew up in Lancaster County and had family roots in the Plain orders, traced the story to its origin, a 1986 memoir written by an Old Order Amishman born in 1897. As a graduate student, Zimmerman Umble started investigating Amish community telephones for a course on contemporary social theory, and ended up writing a book on the subject, Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life.

The Amish consideration of the social effects of tool use reveals that we’re often inconsiderate in our use of tools.

How often do we interrupt a conversation with someone who is physically present in order to answer the telephone? Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly is benefiting from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a dark hint about the way our institutions value human time and life? Can pagers and cell phones that vibrate instead of ring solve the problem? Does the enjoyment of virtual communities by growing numbers of people enhance or erode citizen participation in the civic life of geographic communities?

When I was reading 1901, I was struck by the frequent use of “indeed.” It was anachronistic.

Indeed, the word sticks out like a sore thumb in contemporary use.

Bill Bumgarner wrote

Since giving away my iPod Shuffle to my wife a few weeks ago, I have had need of a portable storage device. Never before, but now I do. Go figure.

and proceeded to discuss storing an encrypted disk image on a USB flash disk.

Where I’ve lived has informed what I like in a place.

• Providence Forge, Virginia
• Loveland, Ohio
• Monterey, Virginia
• Richmond, Virginia
• Annapolis, Maryland
• Hampden-Sydney, Virginia
• The Bronx, New York
• Shrub Oak, New York
• Ossining, New York
• Yorktown Heights, New York
• Mahopac, New York

How I’ve moved around has as well. When I was younger, I was driven in a car; I have fond memories of the wayback of a station wagon. But what sticks in my mind is walking or riding my bike.

The last time we went car shopping, the most annoying use of the option package was Ford‘s. Certain colors were only available with the V8 and towing package, and the V8 was only available with other things that we’d rather not have. The end result was that the price jumped $6,000 or so for things we didn’t want to buy, and Ford lost a potential sale. This time the annoyance factor is all Honda‘s.

The Honda Odyssey comes in a number of trim flavors, between $25,195 and $38,495. The annoying feature is the leather seats. We don’t like them. We really don’t like them. But in order to get nifty features like variable cyclinder management, which you need for somewhat acceptable fuel economy, or stability assist, which prevents fishtailing, you have to get leather seats. I’d prefer not to choose between a better vehicle and cloth seats. I wonder what the lost profit is from not including cloth seats in those models.

I have a simple test for determining the quality of a vendor. Of course, I have no budget, and few listen to me, so my test does not see much use. But if you wonder at the intricacies of buying computing equipment, here’s the test.

Is their supporting documentation privileged? If so, it’s not worth your time or money.

That is all.

If checking the documentation is too hard, here’s another test that you can apply using only software press releases. Does it contain the words “enterprise” or “robust”? If so, they most likely mean it has a robust scent.

Bullshit.

My brother gave us a bottle of Château Morrisette‘s Sweet Mountain Laurel for Christmas. I like this: it tastes of Concord grapes.

A unique and refreshingly sweet dessert style wine made from Native American grape varieties. A firm acidity balances the natural sugars, producing a crisp finish with aromas of freshly picked grapes.

Perhaps one day we New York residents will be able to order it.

A commentator on NPR tells us what word we should use instead of jihad.

Have you noticed that realtor websites do not provide you with the most important piece of information about a property, the location? This is the hook to get their 5%. When they sell, or attempt to sell, the properties, they use easily comparable attributes such as square footage, acreage, room quantities, and so forth. Without speaking with an agent, the most precise location information you can find is the school system and town. Which leaves you, the buyer, in the position of shopping for houses based on architectural characteristics, such as curb appeal, rather than the property’s place in the world.

It may appear that the market demands contempory “colonials” with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths, but those are secondary concerns. What is being bought is the location.

Somewhere in Chicago, there’s a big wirelessed mall.

More than 18,000 daily visitors who frequent the restaurants, food court, train station, retail stores and common areas of The Merchandise Mart — the world’s largest commercial building — and 350 W. Mart Center will now be able to use laptop computers and personal digital assistants to wirelessly connect to the Internet and corporate networks at speeds 50 to 100 times as fast as a dial-up connection. SBC Communications, Inc. (NYSE: SBC) today announced that SBC FreedomLink Wi-Fi service is available throughout The Merchandise Mart, creating the largest SBC hot spot in the city.

So, if you’re in the area, and you have SBC DSL, and you want to tote your computer to the mall, you can get on-line for a measly $1.99 per month. Now if we could just convince the clothing stores to place benches and power outlets next to the dressing rooms…

Scanning a large disk for virii takes a lot of time and resources, often in an impolite manner. Here’s a hypothetical question that the supergeniuses at the anti-virus companies might like to consider: Is there a way to compromise the filesystem’s journal such that disk activity is not recorded? And, if the journal is safe, then [many expletives deleted] scan the journal, not the disk.

Last Friday, Rick pointed me to a paper estimating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. This is a very important question, and deserves respectful consideration by the scientific community.

13pt‘s style.org, “an ongoing series of experimental data graphics,” has some other excellent pieces, including on scaling counties and on word occurences in the State of the Union.

The House passed H.R. 418, the “REAL ID Act of 2005,” today, the thought being that if there’s no support for a national identification card, then perhaps they can get away with nationally consistent identification cards.

Where is Hal Lindsay to rile up the party faithful when you need him?

Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

Oops, I almost forgot. Some want to hasten the day.

Anyway, I’ll need to read this bill when I’m not tired. It deserves comment.

Larry Felton Johnson has accepted the responsibility for pedestrian safety in East Atlanta.

But I finally acknowledged what I’ve known for a long time, that the most efficient means for the citizen of a neighborhood to have a positive impact is to help out in the local community group…

…

While I have no real objections to attempts to engineer pedestrian safety into the built environment via traffic calming schemes as long as noxious unintended consequences are avoided, I don’t believe for a second that engineered solutions are the overall answer to the problem.

The solution as I see it is broad education of drivers concerning the law combined with strict enforcement.

That sounds like a good idea. As far as engineered solutions go, the mid-block crosswalks in New York City seem to work well, from a traffic perspective. Walking in the City is mainly a matter of exercising prudent care: if your path will not intersect that of a car, cross; or, in crossing, alter your path or velocity. Move it, buster.

Somehow I don’t think permitting pedestrians to fire at oncoming traffic would be acceptable, but it might cause drivers to be more cautious.

You mean that there are other languages with other alphabets? And some of those look like ours? The horror!

Homographs, or letters which look alike but aren’t, are the current fascination of phishing exploits. This is a relatively old problem, documented in 2002, of which the IETF was aware.

So, should UNICODE be squeezed into ASCII so that it can be used in hostnames? Which UNICODE? My position on internationalized domain names may be unwelcome: You don’t use an ASCII subset? Tough shit.

I can no more type Hyundai in hangul, than Kim Jong-Il can type Hyundai in Latin. The keyboards don’t permit it.

One of the reasons for the ASCII subset was to be able to transfer the object identifier from the computer to paper and back via my fingers and a pen, or from this computer to that computer without having recourse to copy and paste. It’s certainly much easier to do that with DNS names than, say, X.208’s Object Identifiers. I will admit that the non-Latin world has had to adjust to our alphabet, much as I have had to adjust to Arabic numerals. That’s what happens when you trade: you pick a common language and use it.

Though, now that they’ve stopped teaching writing in the schools, we’ll soon be illiterate, so it won’t much matter.

(On the other hand, I think it’s funny how all these problems come from trying to approximate analog forms within the digital namespace.)

Here’s one. I’m certain you, Gentle Reader, can identify many another.

Microsoft Outlook permits the recipient to edit mails received. This is easily done by accident with RTF messages, but merely needs a menu command for text/html and text/plain messages.

I am certain that Microsoft hires sophomores.

maps.google.com is neat. I’ve got one big complaint, and then I’ll shut up.

The URI in the address bar doesn’t change.

Thanks for the “link to this page” link, but I’d like the location to display in the address bar.