Hey, good news!

A federal court upheld the constitutionality of the National Do Not Call Registry on Tuesday, finally settling a legal battle around enforcement and leaving the popular list in place for the 57.2 million registered.

You can read the opinion yourself from the court, which is graciously providing it online (PDF, Text, WPD).

The summary from the beginning of the opinion:

The four cases consolidated in this appeal involve challenges to the national do-not-call registry, which allows individuals to register their phone numbers on a national "do-not-call list" and prohibits most commercial telemarketers from calling the numbers on that list. The primary issue in this case is whether the First Amendment prevents the government from establishing an opt-in telemarketing regulation that provides a mechanism for consumers to restrict commercial sales calls but does not provide a similar mechanism to limit charitable or political calls. We hold that the do-not-call registry is a valid commercial speech regulation because it directly advances the government's important interests in safeguarding personal privacy and reducing the danger of telemarketing abuse without burdening an excessive amount of speech. In other words, there is a reasonable fit between the do-not-call regulations and the government's reasons for enacting them.

As we discuss below in greater detail, four key aspects of the do-not-call registry convince us that it is consistent with First Amendment requirements. First, the list restricts only core commercial speech i.e., commercial sales calls. Second, the do-not-call registry targets speech that invades the privacy of the home, a personal sanctuary that enjoys a unique status in our constitutional jurisprudence. See Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 484 (1988). Third, the do-not-call registry is an opt-in program that puts the choice of whether or not to restrict commercial calls entirely in the hands of consumers. Fourth, the do-not-call registry materially furthers the government's interests in combating the danger of abusive telemarketing and preventing the invasion of consumer privacy, blocking a significant number of the calls that cause these problems. Under these circumstances, we conclude that the requirements of the First Amendment are satisfied.

Atom has a big hill to climb, but through skillful PR it may not look that way. What this does, as others have observed, is put a freeze on development, while we all wait for the dust to settle with Atom. We must not allow this to happen. The most important thing is to keep the ball rolling.

I support Dave. Let the Atom folk do their own thing but do not let them impose anything on us, no matter how loud they may be. Since patriotic quotes seem to be the theme today, how about the old chestnut "United we stand, divided we fall." And there is simply no reason to be divided.

Everyone's so worried about the Microsoft source leak. "It could open new security holes!" they say. But check this out, the source for Linux, a popular Microsoft competitor, has always been available, and this is promoted by its advocates saying it makes Linux more secure, not less. More programmer eyeballs looking for bugs. Maybe some white-hat types will try to check in some fixes for Windows 2000? Stranger things have happened. - Scripting News

There's no question that it was extremely fortunate that this multi-nation plan was exposed when it was, even though it's likely that either Iran or North Korea have already managed to create enough fissionables for a few weapons. It would have been far better if it had been exposed earlier, but an additional ten year delay would have been catastrophic.

There is equally no doubt at all that those revelations were a direct consequence of the war the US is prosecuting, most especially in Iraq. It is by no means clear that without our war there would have been a significant chance of the plot being exposed until too late.

Nothing returns the joy of weblogging like a new weblog management system. ;-)

In his book, Dr. Atkins recommended against consuming Nutrasweet while trying to lose weight, citing studies that suggest Nutrasweet inhibits weight loss. (I don't there's actually anything specific to the Atkins diet in that regard.) He recommends Sucralose be used instead, which as artificial sweeteners go is pretty cool: It can be used to cook with, it definately doesn't taste exactly like sugar but it's easily the closest of any artificial sweetener I've tried, and of course it has no calories in it.

[re: signing weblog comments] There could be a niche for a minimalist “sign this text” application, if PGP were to soak into general net infrastructure. - Mark Pasc

Pondering the comment issue, I've come to the same conclusion. PGP and GPG are a little too excited about high levels of security, and seem to feel that it's more important that everybody immediately jump to 100% then to allow a more gradual use of the system. (As a result, nobody does; a better way to get people's toes in the water then WWW commenting I can't imagine, but that's not an option, so instead of a 90% solution, we get a 0% solution.) I'd like to see a key type that explicitly says "I'm a low security key! My public component may be hosted on a somewhat insecure webserver, and there is at least some responsibility on the part of my owner to make sure I'm still secure!"

Incidentally, I'm planning a mini-review of PyDS against Radio Userland in a while here, but here's one thing I've gotten to work in PyDS I could never get in Radio Userland (without doing unsupported hacking on the Weblog core): Posts without titles, that actually can modify the generated HTML instead of just sticking an empty string in the template.

As you can see, I like to put boxes around my titles, and in Radio Userland, an empty title results in an empty box. Yucky. So I always wrote a title, even if I had to stretch. I'm thinking this may have inhibited some of my more off-the-cuff comments... like this one.

Reading the comments in this Roger Simon post about the President's Sunday interview reminds me of one of my fond wishes: Just once, I'd like to hear the President publically say something like "You know, it's easy to point out that I'm not the best speech giver in the world. It's a lot harder to plot the course of the free world." Something to just cheese off as many pundits as possible, while being politically a null statement (except for the effects of cheesed-off-based punditry). Along with being fun for me, it might even prove to his benefit since the Democrats really need to control their bretheren who feel inclined to put forth rants of questionable sanity; those folk would be unable to resist frothing at the mouth.

In my last post, I dissociated the concept of "outlineness" from a graph, and showed at least the skeleton of a data structure that allows the power of graphs while preserving the nature of an outline.

In this post, we will fix a flaw in the model built up to that point, which is that there is no way to obtain a list of parents, given a node, only a list of children. For various reasons, this is necessary to building an outliner, so this flaw must be fixed.