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The real major losers are...The real major losers are...Posted Apr 24, 2003 5:54 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66)Parent article: DARPA Cancels OpenBSD Funding ...the citizens of the USA who have elected a government that will pull a last minute fund-yanking stunt like this. The real losers are the citizens of the USA who have managed to elect themselves a government who would decide not to fund OpenBSD development for either of the speculated reasons: because Theo said something essentially irrelevant to the grant which our government doesn't like, or (potentially even more alarmingly) because the government has come to think that capable and secure open source software being available is primarily to the benefit of terrorist nation states. I hear all the comments about "free speech has consequences" and so forth, and have a hard time with them. It's one thing to pull funding from somebody. It's a different thing to pull funding with no warning at the last minute when many people around the world have committed nonrefundable expenses based on the promise of that funding. Isn't there some sort of breech of contract going on here? Longer term, the grad students who lose their funding could be in the lurch too. I don't know anything about this specific situation, but I do know that grad students in general are broke anyway, and suddenly not having even the pittance that you thought you'd been promised as a grad student can leave you in a bad state. Whether or not you think Theo's comments were advised, I have yet to see anything that convinces me that what DARPA did in this situation is defensable. -Rob
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The real major losers are... Posted Apr 24, 2003 12:18 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] The current US government was not elected, just took over.
The real major losers are... Posted Apr 24, 2003 13:33 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] It _was_ elected. Even if you might not be in favor of this decision, it was elected in a democratical way, according to US laws and rules.You might not think those rules are good or right, but many others do, and they have evolved over time, and were decided by democratic decisions. I'm no US citizen, and I'm glad I didn't have to vote because it's quite hard to chose between two awful choices, but the US people made their choice, as I said, in a democratic manner. Well, anyway, that's not what this discussion or this article is about... I think it's not a good thing to speak out against people funding you, especially in a situation where you need the funding for a project. OTOH, it's bad decision to pull the plug just because of one person saying those things one time.
Re: The real major losers are... Posted Apr 24, 2003 14:06 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Actually, the rules were applied unevenly and were completely unclear about what should be done in such a situation. The Supreme Court decided to step in to avoid a Constitutional crises. I have questions about how they made the decision myself. So, I kind of agree when people say Bush wasn't elected. But I don't agree that it was a takeover or coup.
Re: Supreme Court didn't step in; election still an embarassment Posted Apr 25, 2003 23:21 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] The Supreme Court decided to step in to avoid a Constitutional crises This is a misstatement. The Supreme Court's decision was not to act. The Court was petitioned to order Florida officials to recount votes. The Court denied the petition, leaving interpretation of election laws up to Florida. I don't see that a Constitutional crisis was ever in the offing. By the way, for those who believe technicalities of vote counting laws shouldn't matter and the person who got the most votes should simply win, I'd like to point out that an army of journalists did finish an accurate count of every single Florida ballot a year later. It showed that by any interpretation of the unclear ballots (hanging chads, etc.), Bush got the most votes. It is true, though, that in the precincts that were in controversy just after the election, Gore won by some counts. If you want to take pokes at the election results, it is much better to look at 1) Ralph Nader certainly split the vote. Asked to choose between Bush and Gore, voters would have chosen Gore by a landslide. 2) It is quite clear that hundreds of voters using the butterfly ballot preferred Gore but marked their ballots otherwise by mistake. 3) Voting by states achieves no desirable purpose these days; had the vote been a simple popular one, Gore would have won by a wide margin.
Re: Supreme Court didn't step in; election still an embarassment Posted May 1, 2003 21:01 UTC (Thu) by ffeirtag (guest, #10976) [Link] >>The Supreme Court decided to step in to avoid a Constitutional crises>This is a misstatement. The Supreme Court's decision was not to act. Even though this thread is off topic, I can't believe this posting, which Far from deciding "not to act," in The majority wrote: Dissenting, Justice Ginsburg wrote: Dissenting, Justice Breyer wrote: From: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-05-10-recountchrono.htm "Dec. 8: The Florida Supreme Court orders manual recounts to begin in Dec. 9: Counting begins of 43,000 statewide "undervotes" and then halts Dec. 11: U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Bush's appeal of Dec. 12: In late-night, divided opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court rules
OT: Election 2000 Posted Apr 24, 2003 16:43 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] > It _was_ elected. Even if you might not be in favor of this decision, it was elected in a democratical way, according to US laws and rules.This is factually incorrect. I call your attention to the *extensively* footnoted proof offered in the book "None Dare Call It Treason", written by former (104:1 record) LA County Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. No, Bush, et al, were *not* elected pursuant to the US Constitution and Code and the Florida Statutes.
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