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Don’t say you haven’t been warned. NASA put out an official document today specifying how close any future spacecraft and astronauts visiting the Moon can come to the artifacts left on the lunar surface by all US space missions, including the Apollo landing sites, any robotic landing sites like Surveyor and impact sites like LCROSS.

space law history moon lunar nasa

"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of “green governance”―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"

commons law environment governance

"Experts in cyber law told TPM that Twitter’s stance in Harris’ case was undeniably important and could prove to be a landmark one for user privacy and law enforcement’s ability to access user information going forward."

law cyberlaw twitter privacy crime court

"Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason."

copyright intellectual-property samples music hiphop history law culture

"For most of the 20th century, prisoners' stays in solitary confinement were relatively short. "People would get thrown in 'the hole' for a couple days at a time, maybe a couple weeks at a time," says Craig Haney, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research has explored the psychological effects of incarceration.

That's changed over the last two decades or so. "Now they're in the hole for years at a time," he says. Over the last 20 years, so-called "supermax" prisons have become increasingly popular. There, tens of thousands of inmates spend years locked in small cells for 23 to 24 hours a day.."

prison isolation psychology punishment law crime

"As recently as the 1960s there was a wave of literature arguing that the prison was becoming obsolete. Now the prison stands as a key mechanism for how the government has dealt with its own powers, and this has reconfigured the role of government. The law-and-order movement invokes a radically different role of the state in relation to its citizens than the one of the post-New Deal era. Though an incomplete project, the New Deal had a model of the state as a guarantor of economic security and freedom. Now the state primarily interacts with society as a maintainer of order. For those hoping to rebuild freedom through the state, finding a new vision of how government works needs to be at the front of the agenda."

prison punishment law neoliberalism neoconservatism politics power structure

"The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence."

engineering technology critique technology-critique criticism design code law sts culture

"In fact, said Stephenson, we already have much of the fundamental technology we need to fulfill such science fiction ambitions as large scale solar power production, or routine space flight. Instead, he said, we need to start looking at the non-technological obstacles to these advances, citing insurance as a key example. The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved. Turning to the audience of mostly MIT students, Stephenson said "maybe some of you people need to go into the insurance industry instead of writing code." 

science sf future insurance law barriers technology

business capitalism law morality free-trade resources

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics.

science law philosophy explanation evolution complexity

"But despite the inherent unreliability of lie detectors, they have recently seen a rebirth."

crime punishment law lying truth psychology technology

"The results of this study indicate that Americans tend to view crime through a racial lens. Because of this, crime is often associated with “others” — usually poor people of color. It is this “other” status that keeps many Americans from identifying with and having empathy for those caught up in the criminal justice system. This lack of “empathic identification” contributes to Americans’ support for punitive criminal justice policies."

crime law punishment american prison race sociology

At the risk of saying it again, whatever the Supreme Court’s decision regarding Obamacare in June, the net effect of the case has been to illustrate how dramatically the nation’s federal courts have shifted to the right. This shift isn’t evident only in terms of the judiciary’s willingness to embrace long-dormant libertarian ideas, but also in its willingness to wholeheartedly adopt the political language and tone in which these ideas are packaged. Liberals who don’t think of the courts as a political issue should read Judge Brown’s concurrence closely, not merely as an example of the ways partisan politics are bleeding into the federal courts, but as a warning about how radically the federal courts are poised to reshape our politics.    

law legal supreme-court libertarian conservative republican judicial

Comments on 2012 supreme court decision authorizing strip searches after any arrest.

supreme-court law america crime punishment prison power

"The point here is a fundamental one. The covering law model depends on a metaphysics that gives primacy to laws of nature. The framework of critical realism and its cousins depends on a view of the world as consisting of things and processes with real causal powers. This intellectual framework is applicable to the social world as well as to the natural world. And it provides a strong intellectual basis for postulating and investigating social causal mechanisms. Any conception of causal powers requires that we have an idea of the nature of the substrate of causation in various areas. And the social metaphysics of actor-centered sociology provide a strong candidate for such a framework in the case of social causation."

philosophy social-science epistemology law nomological explanation causation logical-positivism positivism realism

"Seventy years after Hempel's classic article, the covering law theory is now generally regarded as a fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about historical (and social) explanation. Logical positivism is not a convenient lens through which to examine the social and historical sciences. There is too much contingency in the social world. Rather than being the result of law-governed processes, social outcomes proceed from the contingent and historically variable features of the actors who make them. So the attention of many people interested in specifying the nature of historical and social explanation has focused on social mechanisms constituted and driven by common features of agency."

philosophy social-science epistemology law nomological explanation causation logical-positivism positivism

A point I've argued many times but usually fail to convince.
"Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. "

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"The necessary feature of the open systems and networks that Doctorow advocates is that they must preserve the possibility of evil. The systematic exclusion of evil breaks the open (unit operational) nature of the system. From a political perspective, you won’t score too many points campaigning for the preservation of the possibility of evil. The most successful argument of this kind is the theological argument around why God has given humans free will. Being good without choosing good means that goodness isn’t a virtue. The possibility of choosing evil makes the choice of good meaningful. Pre-deleting evil processes from the operating environment pre-empts the possibility of choosing to run good processes and the act of terminating the evil ones."

computing computers freedom open architecture history future law regulation evil good design purpose open-source

"Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind.

In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are codified and legally mandated to a certain extent. Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind."

law mind habit professional thinking style dialectic judicial