RIGHTS:  One Step Forward, Two Back. Or Is It the Other Way...
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BRUSSELS, Sep 23 (IPS) - Turkey took a step closer to the European Union  Thursday after EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen said  he was âsatisfiedâ that a row over Turkey's penal code had  been resolved.
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But is anyone on the other end of the line?
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Despite critics who say patientsâ bills of rights laws are actually designed to protect health care providers, new research published in the current issue of the American Journal of Medicine found just the opposite.
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Options, options, options -- when will the madness end?
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What if other walks of life had restatements?
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By Alfonse D'Amato  The Fair Media Council posted a Media Bill of Rights on its blog recently, and it requires reprinting in good old-fashioned ink. In the interest of complete accuracy, it's really not about the media's rights, which are pretty much covered under the First Amendement.
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Getting the future right isn't as important as feeling right about the future.
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You can learn a lot from writing a newspaper column, especially when a reader calls in to say that you're wrong. I've just received a revealing critique that foreshadows a nasty new escalation in the battle over our digital rights.
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Activist jurisprudence is insane. Courts may overturn the original intent of the Constitution because "it was written so long ago" but may not overturn Roe v. Wade -- because "it was written so long ago." Ryan Larsen  Salt Lake City  (c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City).
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Chasing relative performance leads to a short-term orientation.
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How far is too far when it comes to the freedom of software? Plus: Palm slipping, Windows sliding.
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Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.  Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.  But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.
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Should ecosystems have legal rights of their own, just like humans?  Thomas Linzey thinks so.
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Some mistakes are not always mistakes.
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If you can see train tracks from your front window, you probably live on the wrong side of them. At one time, my view beyond the tracks was a line of factories nobody wanted to live near. Like the place where they make carpets. Or even worse, the wool scourers, which smell like hot vomit during business hours.  What I don't get is how they got to be classified as being on the right side. Maybe if they did some rezoning and it was the factories that were officially on the wrong side of the tracks, my life would have turned out differently.
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When Times and Tribune reported results this week, the two headed in different directions.