Vote!

I rarely publish anything partisan since most people have already made up their mind– and this piece is no exception. It will take a huge paradigm shift for someone to change a political point of view or affiliation.

But, now is your time to make a difference and put your political thoughts, ideas, and beliefs into action by voting. My goal isn’t to tell you what to think, especially not via a one-sided, emotional story that's out of context; rather, my point is to encourage you how to think using logic and reason for a deeper understanding of the issues. There are a times when we simply want to be told what to think, instead of figuring it out, ourselves – this is not one of those times.

The more citizens who vote, the more representative our federal presidential constitutional republic will be.

Protesting Without Action is Complaining

Most all political talk from private citizens (social media, beer and bar philosophizing, etc) ranges from useless noise to parroting others' views without critical thought and deep understanding. Protest without identifiable, effective action is simply complaining. Sure, sometimes the sheer volume of the protest, in itself, is enough to effect change, but that’s rare --- especially when protesters' views are diametrically opposed those of their government. Protesting didn’t work effectively during the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism during WW II, Tiananmen Square, etc. It's great that we have the right to air our grievances but it's terrible how much work it takes to be effective in the face of government power. Giving blood for a failed cause isn't effective.

Politics, without objective truth, is partisanship and, frequently, chauvinism in its extreme forms. I can usually justify a position on either side of a political hot button issue simply by flipping the timeframe from short-term to long-term, or vice versa; what seems like a good idea, today, might be bad decision, tomorrow. As a random example, it’s very easy to oppose most any ballot initiatives involving construction/infrastructure development with a blanket claim “the biggest beneficiary of this initiative is the general contractor since they’ll be paid to do this work.”

While the Constitution may be nearly ideal, our government is made of imperfect people and politicians who decided that slavery was good business, women shouldn’t vote, Japanese-American citizens needed to be interned during WW II, etc. We make mistakes.

Democrats vs. Republicans

Democrats and Republicans both try to create a fair government, but they go about it from different angles.

By de facto definition, Democrats tend to be left-leaning liberals who believe there are inherent inequalities in society which need to be evened out. For example, simply because a person grew up in a broken home doesn’t mean they shouldn't be given the opportunity to reach their full potential if given a little boost (i.e. grant, scholarship, etc). This left-leaning philosophy does not fully describe my political leanings in all cases.

By de facto definition, Republicans tend to be right-leaning conservatives who feel that all inequalities in society can’t be evened out, believing that societal hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable. For example, some citizens will continue to make very poor decisions (declare bankruptcy, drive drunk, etc) and they shouldn’t be allowed to game the system and receive free handouts at tax payers' expense. This right-leaning philosophy does not fully describe my political leanings in all cases.

What we really want are humble leaders with a human side, not heroic leaders who we expect to be perfectly infallible. Leaders who thoughtfully look at the issues and make decisions based on a responsibility for the long term while focusing on the present.

Rule of Law: Punish Everyone?

Judge Judy, chatting with my mother in Little Italy, NYC,
epitomizes the rule of law – with a big dose of common sense.

The rule of law states that every person (or legal entity) is subject to the law. But that doesn't mean every person must be punished for every crime.

Thanks to the Constitution and jurisprudence, a punishment can be reduced or suspended. We've frequently been the recipient of this benefit when pulled over for speeding and let off with a warning. This doesn't violate the rule of law since the warning is a form of punishment.

But, what about the case where most people aren't warned, sentenced, cited, arrested, or punished? Does it violate the rule of law when a police office sets up a speed trap and ignores all the drivers who are going over the speed limit by only a few miles per hour? The short answer is no, because even though these drivers aren't punished, they are still subject to the law. So, while they aren't punished, they could be. Rule of law is upheld.

Bombing American Suspects

A US military hand grenade has a
15' kill radius and 50' injury radius.

The Dallas Police Department set a new law enforcement precedence, earlier this month, when they bombed the alleged sniper who shot 12 police officers, killing five. (The media uses terms such as alleged and suspected because a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. They are suspected until convicted. This is an important concept that literally makes America great.) The pound of C4 (Composition C) explosive used in the Dallas bombing counter-attack is more than twice as much explosive found in a typical hand grenade (Composition B, with steel fragments).

I have no doubt, had I been a member of the Dallas Police Department, that I would have supported the bombing. It's very "Dirty Harry-ish." It's very "Charles Bronson-ish." Quick and decisive justice. But the anger at the sniper, Micah Xavier Johnson, doesn't necessarily make this tactic right in a moral sense. Keep in mind that what works on TV, even reality TV, doesn't necessarily work in the real world. (Even though reality TV shows aren't scripted, they're still produced and directed.)

Police have the authority to use lethal force for defensive purposes, but this isn't a license to kill or summarily execute. So, the question hanging in the air is, "Is it wrong for the police to bomb suspects?"  The short answer is, "It depends." It depends on police departments codifying their procedures, openly, in a manner that doesn't conflict with any American's civil rights. Discussing and debating these laws openly is key, otherwise it will end up in a shady area like law enforcement's controversial use of the StingRay phone tracker.

Is it wrong to use atomic or nuclear weapons in war? For my entire lifetime, and then some, the answer has been a resounding, "Yes, it is very wrong." Yet, America is the only country to use atomic weapons. By doing so, America set a contrarian precedence that no one, including us, should detonate these weapons of war. So far, it's worked. It's worked primarily because of national treaties, MAD, and, more importantly, due to the fact that the effort required to create an atomic weapon is on the scale of putting a person into orbit. No organization has done either other than a national government. But that will change.

Where do I stand on the Dallas bombing tactic? While I wish the police didn't need to use military tactics on American's, here's the pragmatic reality of a tactical commander in the field... no one should second guess them. Police have rules of engagement (ROE) to follow. There were no ROE forbidding the use of atomic weapons in WW II because there was no precedence. But, once a precedence has been set, it becomes time to address it.

In the short term, the concern at hand is, if cops overreact and shoot blacks, and then blacks overreact and shoot cops, and then cops overreact and shoot blacks... well then, how does that end?

Legalizing Cannabis

For the first time a clear majority of Americans have favored legalizing marijuana. Although I have never used pot – despite the fact that I was diagnosed with stage IV metastasized cancer and treated with chemo for six months –  I'm sure that it's only a matter of time until it becomes mainstream as more and more states legalize it like Colorado and Washington even though it's still illegal under federal law.

When I was a kid, pot was vilified almost as badly as homosexuality. Growing up, I was taught that being gay was "sick" – a condition that needed to be cured, medically. I've never seen so much hate generated against people who want to love. Now, being gay is legally okay as same-sex marriage is accepted with pot not far behind.

Isn't smoking bad? Sure, but how many people die from a marijuana overdose? I was amazed when I saw the statistics. Overdosing from marijuana appears to be as likely as overdosing on nicotine from cigarettes: "... one would have to smoke thousands of [joints] in a short period of time to approach toxic levels." Plus, the medical benefits of pot seem to grossly outweigh the benefits of nicotine.

About two months ago I had a chance encounter with a 22 year old "drug dealer" who owned a medical marijuana dispensary in L.A. His revenues were more than $4,000/day and, after expenses, he cleared over $60,000/month. That's about three quarters of a million dollars per year for him to split with his business partner. It's an obvious understatement that pot, like cigarettes and caffeine (the world's most popular drug) are highly profitable.

Perhaps we've been caught up in the rhetoric, instead of the facts, when denouncing marijuana as former White House Fellow, neurosurgeon, and CNN Emmy award winning chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, revealed earlier this year?

'Cannonball Run' Speed Record Shattered

I was thrilled to see a photo of my buddy, Dave Black, in the lead article on cnn.com as part of a team that broke the cross country driving record from NYC to LA in a Mercedes Benz. I just got off the phone with Dave – he and I worked together on a daily basis at Apple's K–12 division ten years ago – and he's very pleased at the favorable attention his team's received and his driving partner, Ed Bolian, is flying off to New York for an interview on the Today Show.

Dave's always been enamored with the opening scene of the Cannonball Run and he realized his dream of owning a Lamborghini last year.

There's nothing like hot women driving a hot car through the hot desert to stimulate the attention of a teenage boy.

Danger

Sure, speeding from NYC to LA is risky from both a safety and legal point; after all, they did average 98 mph and topped out at 158 mph. To that end, I'd say those who have never intentionally sped can cast the first stone. The team did some very detailed planning and Dave is experienced at high speed driving both on the race track and on the Autobahn. And, sure, they could get in trouble for this if some legal evidence is discovered and prosecuted – but I suspect that won't be the case for a couple reasons. First, no single law enforcement agency was embarrassed like the NYC police department this past summer. Second, the long arm of the law would have to prove who was driving and when.

This accomplishment, in a non-reckless manner, is a testimonial to the entrepreneurial spirit that defines Dave's life.

My Civic Duty

Learning about jury duty from an "actual juror."

What better way to pass the time on jury duty than to blog about it?

I've never served on a civilian jury, but I have participated in courts-martial. In the military, the jury is referred to as the members and the foreperson is called the president. In the summer of 1996 I served as the president of a special court-martial. I had no idea what the case was about until the first witness took the stand and described her consenting sexual encounters, in detail, with the accused who was a Marine sergeant.

Some key differences between a military trial and a civilian trial is that the members (jurors) are allowed to question witnesses after the defense and prosecution are done. To avoid any inappropriate questions the members write them down on a slip of paper which the bailiff passes to the judge for review. If the judge has no concerns then both the defense and the prosecution have a chance to review the question and object before it's asked of the witness.

Another key difference about a court-martial was that we, the members, also chose the sentence for the crime. Since we found the sergeant guilty our choices varied from no punishment, other than the guilty verdict, to time in the brig (prison). As the members, we deliberated and voted on each possible punishment starting with the least severe until we had a consensus. We ended up sentencing the sergeant to reduction in rank to corporal and forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay for several months. Realistically, a guilty verdict was a career ender since this conviction would give the sergeant a black mark preventing his reenlistment.

The charges against the sergeant were adultery which is rarely prosecuted unless there's a confession or overwhelming evidence such as a video. Adultery along with sodomy and oral sex are still violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In other words, these acts are crimes for active duty military personnel – even between married partners.

Well, it looks like my name was called for an eight day trial. I'm one of 47 for this trial. Let's see where it goes from here.

Bread and Water

When I was a Midshipman at the Naval Academy I took a Law for the Junior Officer course. It covered the procedures, processes, and punishments of military law and the UCMJ.

Our instructor was a JAG Navy commander. He earned a Bronze Star during Desert Storm by monitoring radio networks and preventing a fratricide incident in the heat of battle.

He taught us a great lesson in creativity that he learned when he was a legal advisor to an aircraft carrier captain.

A Navy ship's captain, who is the commanding officer of the ship, can hold legal proceedings and dish out punishment. One punishment that's still on the books in the U.S. Navy is bread and water. To receive this punishment, a prisoner's first certified as healthy by the ship's doctor before confined to the brig.

My law professor told us that the bread and water punishment didn't work out as well as expected. The delinquents ended up bragging, after their incarceration, about how they survived the "old man's" most severe punishment allowed by law. Instead of a punishment, it became a point of pride.

What to do?

My professor had his ship's legal team take a closer look at the bread and water regulation:

(A) if imposed upon a person attached to or embarked in a vessel, confinement on bread and water or diminished rations for not more than three consecutive days;

A light bulb went off when they read, "diminished rations." Instead of serving bread and water, the prisoner was now fed baby food. Same caloric content, just a different medium.

Telling shipmates they survived three days on baby food ended the bravado.

Author: Joe Moreno

NJP & Request Mast

Over the centuries, the military has done a great job at refining some processes and procedures for handling matters quickly and efficiently There are two, in particular, that stick out in my mind.

Non-Judicial Punishment
One common U.S. military procedure is Article 15 non-judicial punishment, also known as "office hours" or "captain's mast," depending on the branch of the military.

Think of Article 15 as "Judge Judy" for punitive matters. Although the defendant almost always has the option of choosing a trial by court-martial, they rarely do. It's usually a clear cut case that the defendant is guilty. They'd rather accept the lesser punishment handed out at an Article 15 procedure than a stiffer sentence from a court-martial conviction.

Request Mast
Another very effective, yet rarely used, procedure is request mast which allows any Marine to redress a grievance up their chain of command without repercussions.

A Marine will request mast when there's an issue which can't be handled at a lower level. This process cannot be denied and the request has to be passed along with no more than a business day's delay between each link in the chain of command --- all the way up to the commanding general, if requested.

What type of complaint could be so important that it can't be handled but at the highest levels? Let's just say that you'd better get this right if you're requesting mast. As a matter of fact, I've never seen a Marine, that I personally knew, request mast. But, I have heard of a few interesting stories.

Military Police
The most memorable case of request mast I've observed was requested by a Marine military policeman (MP). The MP had arrested a squadron commanding officer for DUI. The CO was booked and released. But, the case "disappeared." Obviously, the CO had influenced someone to make his problem go away.

Enter the arresting MP, who, if I recall correctly, was a lance corporal. He requested mast all the way up to the base commanding general. Lo and behold, the CO, who was a colonel, was outed. Part of the colonel's punishment was to enter "level 3" (in patient) alcohol treatment.

See, there is justice.

Author: Joe Moreno

Was the Killing of bin Laden Legal?

Under the law of war, a combatant can engage the enemy at any time as long as they're not surrendering. Even if the enemy is running from the fight (retreating) - as was the case at the Highway of Death - they're still a legitimate target. Surrender is an honorable action when you no longer have any means to resist (Article II of the Code of Conduct).


This leads to a couple questions.
1. Was bin Laden a civilian?
2. If so, can civilians be considered combatants?

The short answer to the second question is yes; even if bin Laden was considered a civilian, civilians can be considered combatants when they take up arms (some exceptions are peace officers, such as the police).

When civilians take up arms it is referred to as levée en masse. Al Qada's attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 & 2001, American embassies in East African in 1998, USS Cole in 2000, etc. were attacks (acts of war) against the sovereign nation of the United States of America. Al Qada carried out these attacks as a perverse misinterpretation of Islamic defensive jihad. Therefore, the plan to capture or kill bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear) was legal.

Thought Exercise
Now here's an interesting thought, try reversing the situation. What is the status of the President of the United States? He's clearly the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, yet he is a definitely a civilian. Imagine if Iraqi commandos flew into Texas, captured former President Bush, and labeled him a war criminal for attacking and occupying Iraq? How would Article 98 of the Rome Statute apply?

The End?
The real challenge is figuring out how the end to the War on Terror will look. What parties will sign the treaty? Will al Qada, one day, gain legitimacy in the eyes of the U.N., like the PLO did in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to take a seat at the table?

Smoking Bans

I didn't know that is was legal for parents, in Massachusetts, to give a cigarette to a minor.


Via: MedicalInsurance.org

Handling CNAME Web Requests

I was recently playing around with DNS CNAME aliasing and I began to wonder how different sites handle an incoming request which has a different host header than the one that was expected.

Virtual Hosting
In the early days of the web (before the mid-1990s) it wasn't always possible to host multiple domains at the same IP address unless the web server supported virtual hosting. Virtual hosting allows a server at a single IP address to analyze the host header of each request to properly serve up the correct web page. This is a brilliant solution and Amazon's S3 web service makes excellent use of this technique so you can use your own domain name to serve up content from S3.

For example, here is a static webpage, hosted on Amazon's S3, but you'd never know where it's hosted by looking at the URL. One way to find out that this is hosted on S3 is to use the dig or host command from the command line:

[jmoreno@ ~]$ host web.joemoreno.com

web.joemoreno.com is an alias for web.joemoreno.com.s3.amazonaws.com.

web.joemoreno.com.s3.amazonaws.com is an alias for s3-directional-w.amazonaws.com.

s3-directional-w.amazonaws.com is an alias for s3-2-w.amazonaws.com.

s3-2-w.amazonaws.com has address 207.171.185.131


CNAME to Another Website
This got me thinking, "What if I pointed my own host name at another website?" This would be less like framing another website (via an HTML frame or iframe) and more like hyperlinking to other's content.

So, I tried it out with three popular sites and each handles it differently.

CNN
http://news.joemoreno.com
CNN doesn't appear to look at the host name header for the incoming request and simply serves up its content. It seems that the only problem this presents is when content is served up via Flash such as ads and video. In other words, Flash ads and video are broken when the host name isn't cnn.com. Since the links on the CNN website are relative, the host name in the web browser doesn't change when clicking on other cnn.com links.

NY Times
http://nytimes.joemoreno.com
The NY Times also doesn't look at the host name of the incoming request to see if it's nytimes.com or www.nytimes.com. However, the NY Times uses absolute URLs on its website so clicking on any link clears out the previous host name and replaces it with www.nytimes.com.

Twitter
http://twitter.joemoreno.com
Twitter handles this issue perfectly. Their web server looks at the host name of the incoming request and, if it's not twitter.com, it returns a 301 redirect to twitter.com while keeping the rest of the request intact.

Legal Issues
I spoke with a couple attorneys who specialize in Internet law to see if this has ever been an issue. They were not aware of any cases where the CNAME aliasing was challenged in court. The most similar case was in 1997 when the Washington Post sued Total News, Inc. since the latter was framing the former's news content. However, a court decision was never reached since it was settled out of court a few months later.

Regardless of the lack of legal challenges, it's possible that a company would be concerned about brand dilution. However, the issues with HTML framing, CNAMES, etc. would most likely be solved by implementing a simple and inexpensive technical solution instead of suing.

Solution
Some companies might not like another website aliasing their website without explicit permission and others might not care. In practice, the deciding factor would be lost revenues or brand damage. Solving this problem is much like preventing someone from framing, deep-linking or hot-linking into your website. The solution is to look at the referrer of each web request and change it if it's not what it should be.

Conclusion
The benefits of aliasing another website, via a CNAME, without them knowing isn't clear. Although many sites will frame other's content without them knowing, the web site that's the target of the framing can simply break the frame with just a single line of JavaScript embedded in the page's HTML:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (parent.frames.length > 0)
{ parent.location.href = location.href; }
</script>


A very similar JavaScript could be written to simply look at the request's host name. If it's not the correct host name then reload the page with the correct host name (although I haven't tested this theory).

This observation is simply offered as a proof of concept.

Over Lawyering on the Web

Is it just me or have lawyers gone too far with all things online such as terms of service, license agreements, and disclaimers in e-mails? Of course, the only people that can answer this question are probably the very lawyers who come up with these requirements.

How important are a website's terms? I don't have to agree to any terms of service when I go to the local mall. But, if I pull out a camera and begin taking photos they can ask me to leave since it's private property (with public access - very similar to a website). Being a guest would seem to be a good analogy. I invite you into my house (or my place of business) and I can ask you to leave at anytime.

The disclaimers at the end of e-mail seem to be a bit over the top. Shouldn't I have to agree to the disclaimer? And, if I don't agree with it should I be bound to delete the e-mail? It simply seems unnecessary. If there is any legal precedence for these e-mail disclaimers, I'd love to know more.

Photo Copyright

When a photographer snaps a photo, he or she owns the copyright to that photo. The copyright is secured upon creation of the work by the artist.

So, if I'm traveling with my family on vacation and I have a stranger take our family photo, should I get the stranger to sign a release?

Of course, this is a non-issue, but I could easily see a rare case that would capture the media's attention.