Imagine if the rules for carbon emissions constraint by different countries were applied to wages and taxation within the community: Those who are poorest would be hardest hit, needing to return to wages of a few years ago ... and as most would be young "developing" workers, that might be before they were working, or working for a pittance as a trainee. Meanwhile, the wealthiest might well be getting more money, based on their income from boom times when they were ripping everyone else off through commissions on dodgy derivatives. There'd be a bloody revolution.

Many conservatives seem to think that the suspects we have in custody do not deserve a trial, as they are seen as Prisoners of War. POW's do not have a right to trial, and are normally interned for the duration of the particular conflict. And that might pose a problem here, as technically the war on terror will never actually be over, and these prisoners were never soldiers of a particular country. Not to mention the fact that we have already arrested, tortured, and even managed to kill some of those we believed to be our enemies, and the only problem here of course is that we managed to arrest innocent people, and even kill some of them while in custody. So, indefinite detention seems a rather imperfect solution to the problem.

I am a poster child for public health. Why do I say this? Because I live in a state where there is a low-income, public healthcare option. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was able to utilize this option for my treatment. It worked, and it worked extremely well.

Wireless broadband has become a common, useful tool for many people. Toyota has recognized this by introducing a 2010 Prius outfitted with wireless built-in broadband connection. It's like having a smart phone on wheels.

Maybe there's something in the air. After the recent news that Microsoft is going to publish the documentation of the PST file format used by Outlook, there is now an article in Wired reporting that Sequoia Voting Systems will publish the source code for their new optical-scan voting system. This is, in its own way, as noteworthy as the announcements of Microsoft's new openness; Sequoia historically has fought tooth and nail to keep its source code and other details of its systems secret.

Evegeny Morozov over at Foreign Policy recently shared this story from the Russian site InfoX.ru, which reports that Russia is considering technical filtering options. ONI research has not found technical filtering in Russia to date, so if this plan goes through it could be one of the first known instances of technical filtering in Russia.

The net neutrality fight is on, as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's proposal for new rules moved on to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Now, the two sides are digging in: AT&T, telcos, and unions on one side; Google and content providers on the other. I tend to favor protecting end-to-end in the Internet context, but I'm a bit worried about what the net neutrality rules will look like in practice.

Almost since the first time-sharing computer was accessed with a dumb terminal, a phone line, and a modem, maintaining the security of remote access has been the concern of system administrators. We use passwords, of course, but these suffer from a number of potential problems, as I've discussed before. Two-factor authentication schemes have been used in an attempt to bolster security, but they can be attacked, too.

I'm sure most readers are familiar with the story of the Trojan Horse, told most notably in Virgil's Latin epic, The Aeneid, in which the Greeks used a clever trick " a giant horse with soldiers hidden inside " to overcome the city of Troy. In the computing world of today, a Trojan Horse is a malicious program disguised as a program that does something useful.

There is a pernicious bit of contract law theory called "efficient breach", beloved of unscrupulous capitalists, "the view that a party should be allowed to breach a contract and pay damages, if doing so would be more economically efficient than performing under the contract". But would they want long-term homeless folk reading Posner, breaching not a contract to supply widgets, but the social contract?

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