http://www.rollingstone.com/features/featuregen.asp?pid=2763

The World's Most Dangerous Geek
Justin Frankel, the man who popularized file-sharing, has even bigger plans
By David Kushner

The most dangerous man in music is ready to rock. It's Saturday night in San Francisco as Justin Frankel, gangly and bed-headed, ambles through the warehouse garage he aptly calls his "playground." He has come here, as he often does, to screw around on his drums or his Moog or electric guitar. But first he needs his fog machine.

"It's around here somewhere," he says, checking under his makeshift concert stage, a riser set against a wall postered with naked women. Then he looks under his Porsche, his VW van, his Swiss military truck, his Go Big scooter, his gutted Audi. He pokes his head behind a hacked Xbox, pulsing the word SeXbox onto a forty-eight-inch flat screen. No luck. "I don't know if I have any CO2 cartridges for it anyway," he says, bumming. Not to worry, there's always his light-show laser. A twenty-five-year-old with $100 million deserves his toys.

If you've downloaded a song in the past few years, it's in large part because of Justin Frankel. Seven years ago, when he was just eighteen, he invented Winamp, the first software program that made it easy to play digital music on your computer. A few years later, he created Gnutella: the vast, and vastly controversial, online network that lets you swap songs. The fact that Frankel secretly did the latter while working at America Online, the company behind his multimillion-dollar buyout, made him both the Internet's greatest punk -- and hero. Now he's about to punk the industry again.

That's because, after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence. "This is an environment where I don't get to do what I want to do," he says. What he wants to do is even more radical than Gnutella. And to do this, he needs to break free. "Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless," he says. When I ask him if they have anything to fear by him leaving, he replies, half-jokingly, "If anything, they have more to fear when I'm working for them."



Frankel kills the lights and gets behind the drums. Despite my rusty chops, he encourages me to strap on an electric guitar. "Things I've done are often interpreted as anti-record-industry," he says, "but it's really about empowering people."

Back in 1996, when a seventeen-year-old Frankel downloaded his first song -- "Pepper," by the Butthole Surfers -- no one really cared about such things. Napster didn't exist. The Recording Industry Association of America hadn't sued a twelve-year-old girl in the projects for downloading, among other things, the theme song to the TV show Full House, and America Online hadn't started hemorrhaging 2 million subscribers a year.

The son of a lawyer and a postal worker, Frankel grew up in a mobile home in the hippie nexus of Sedona, Arizona, where he spent his afternoons taking apart old radios or constructing elaborate model airplanes. "Once Justin gets an idea for something," his father, Charles, says, "he finds a way to create it."

Unchallenged by classes, Frankel took control of his own education, largely directing his own home schooling. Around then, he also started messing with his brother's Atari 8-bit computer. By the time he started high school, he was a self-taught whiz. He ran the school's computer network and racked up a better than 4.0 GPA. In addition to writing an e-mail program for the school, Frankel coded software he called Happy Bug, which would log the keystrokes of teachers at their machines. "It would show you everything they typed," he recalls. But he didn't create the program to steal tests or eavesdrop, he says. "It was more like, 'Cool, look what I can do.'"

After graduating from high school in 1996, he enrolled at the University of Utah, but he clashed with his more traditional computer-science professors and dropped out after two semesters. A few months later, he uploaded Winamp (the name is short for Windows Amplifier). With its equalizer, playlist features and trippy visuals, Winamp trumped every MP3 player out there. In a year and a half, 15 million people downloaded the program. A sizable portion even sent in the voluntary ten-dollar shareware fee that Frankel had requested, reluctantly, on his parents' advice. With tens of thousands of dollars coming in every month, his dad all but abandoned his law practice to help field calls from companies that wanted to cash in on the outfit Justin nihilistically called Nullsoft, a play on Microsoft.

But Justin, despite buying himself a used turbo Audi, was in no rush to sell out. Early on, he had included the tag line "Winamp whips the llama's ass" (riffed from a line in a song by the late schizophrenic Chicago street singer Wesley Willis) on every player. When a pharmaceutical company offered big money to adapt Winamp for use in sales presentations -- on the condition that he remove the tag line -- Frankel balked, and the deal fell apart.

Soon, Frankel coded another program, Shoutcast, do-it-yourself broadcasting software that let people "stream" their own audio over the Net. By 1999, Winamp and Shoutcast put digital music -- and its young creator -- on the map. And America Online wanted in, to the tune of $100 million. Frankel responded with two words: "Holy crap!"

In addition to acquiring Nullsoft in the summer of 1999, the company paid $300 million for Spinner, the leading online-radio service at the time. These were the boom years, and the message was loud and clear: The future of music was on the "information superhighway," and Justin Frankel, hired to further develop Winamp as the standard MP3 player, was going to drive it. And AOL was going to own it. In a statement, AOL's chief operating officer, Bob Pittman, the guy who had previously created MTV, trumpeted, "Combining these leading Internet music brands with the audience reach of our brands will lift music online to the next level of popularity." He had no idea.

"All right, Radiohead!" says frankel, shuffling to a row of CDs inside Amoeba Music, a sprawlingly hip record store in Haight-Ashbury. He's wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He has the patchy Chia-like beard of a dude who doesn't give a shit about patchy Chia-like beards.

"When Hail to the Thief leaked on the Internet," Frankel says, "I was like, 'Right on!' But I still bought the CD. I think it's wrong to download music and never give anything to the artist. But if you download something and you're like, 'This sucks,' and you never listen to it again, I don't think there's anything wrong with that." A true child of Sedona, Frankel maintains a heartfelt sense of morality and karma. It's this passion to do right by music fans that inspired him to create the very thing that so many people consider to be wrong: Gnutella.

Gnutella's birth came at the end of what Frankel now calls his "very short honeymoon" with America Online. At first, it seemed like the ultimate setup: good money, a nice office and the freedom to work on the next version of Winamp. But it didn't take long for things to sour. Almost immediately after the deal was struck, persnickety hackers online cried "sellout." Frankel's girlfriend broke up with him because, he says, "she got freaked out by the money." And the big, open office Nullsoft and Spinner shared in San Francisco got Dilbertized by AOL. "Three months after we arrived," Frankel says, "they built all these cubicles, and it sucked."

It was inside his cubicle one day that Frankel first saw Napster. File-trading wasn't new. But Shawn Fanning, Napster's nineteen-year-old creator, had coded a clever piece of software that made this geekish pastime user-friendly. "When I first saw Napster, I thought, 'Wow, that's pretty cool,' " Frankel says, " 'but how will they keep from getting sued?'"

Napster had a fatal flaw. Fanning was using a bank of his company's own computers to facilitate all those Metallica songs flying back and forth online, and Fanning was setting himself up to profit from copyright infringement. "Napster was a company built on people doing things that are illegal," Frankel says. "That's wrong." Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster.



Frankel decided to "take the wind out of Napster's sails." His solution: an online network that could let people trade all kinds of files -- songs, videos, whatever -- in a decentralized environment. By connecting people's computers directly with one another, they could trade data without having to go through some company's rack of servers. Best of all, Frankel thought, such technology would be good karma, too. "I would not be getting any money from it," he says. "I'd be giving power to people, and what can be wrong with that?"



Frankel got to work on what became Gnutella, named after the chocolate-hazelnut spread and, more tellingly, the "GNU" free-software project. He coded fast and on the sly. "I didn't want AOL to find out," he says, "because they'd prevent it from happening."



On March 14th, 2000, Frankel and Tom Pepper, a Nullsoft cohort, uploaded an early version of Gnutella, with a note: "Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL can bring you good things!" The next day, Frankel was with his parents touring Alcatraz, appropriately enough, when his cell phone rang. It was Pepper. "Dude," Pepper said, "you better get back to the office."



By the time Frankel returned, he says, "the shit had hit the fan." The timing of Gnutella couldn't have been worse from the company's point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement.

AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an "unauthorized freelance project." But Gnutella, unlike Napster, couldn't be stopped. More than 10,000 people had downloaded the beta software that first day, and intrepid hackers had gone to work to reverse-engineer it and throw it into the hands of the open-source community, laying the foundation for BearShare, Morpheus, LimeWire and otherfile-trading wares.

With Gnutella, Napster became almost irrelevant. There was no company to sue, no computers to shut down. AOL had paid Frankel $100 million for a slice of the future, but Frankel decided he'd rather give the future away.

After that, Frankel says, AOL kept him on "a very short leash," steering him away from interviewers and encouraging him to focus on Winamp, the program they paid him 100 million friggin' dollars to work on in the first place. Not surprisingly, he acted out. In August 2000, he uploaded an MP3 search engine. AOL took it down. The next month, he uploaded to a secret section of the Nullsoft site a program called AIMazing, which would replace the banner ads in AOL's Instant Messenger with an image of a musical heartbeat. Frankel called it nothing more than "a cute innovation." The Wall Street Journal called Frankel "AOL's loose cannon."

AOL cracked down, again -- this time requiring Frankel to seek approval before blogging online. "We fought off the AOL bullshit as much as possible," he says. When the company tried to insist that an AOL icon instantly appear on a user's desktop during a Winamp installation, Frankel hit the roof. "I'd be like, 'Look, our users don't want to use AOL!' " he says. " 'They think AOL sucks!'"

But Winamp was having problems of its own, losing ground to Windows Media and RealPlayer, both of which incorporated video streaming. Nullsoft attempted to re-establish the brand with Winamp 3.0. But the new version was bloated, if not somewhat embarrassing -- particularly for Frankel, who prided himself on lean, simple wares. On Frankel's urging, Nullsoft trimmed back the next version of the player, calling it Winamp 2.9.

Around that time, Frankel began tinkering with a new kind of software. Taking the name from an underground postal system in the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49, Frankel created Waste: a "private workspace," as he calls it, that allows small groups of friends to trade files without being as conspicuous as those on the larger peer-to-peer networks.

Sometimes called a "darknet," it's a kind of mini-Gnutella, a small, password-protected file-trading network. Because you can't get in unless you're invited, even the most intrepid hackers -- or recording-industry lawyers -- would have trouble figuring out when or where a Waste system is running.

This time around, Frankel took the high road. He tried pitching Waste to AOL, but after the company dragged its feet for months, he got fed up. On May 28th, 2003, four years to the date that he was acquired, Frankel rebelled again -- uploading Waste as a way to force AOL to deal with it, and him, once and for all. "AOL as a company should not just sit on their asses and try to keep from losing as many subscribers as it can," he says. "I mean, I'm a stockholder of the company. I want them innovating. I want them doing things that are good for the world and being socially conscious."

AOL responded by taking the program down. (AOL had no comment about Waste for this story.) Days later, Frankel took it to the people one last time. "For me, coding is a form of self-expression," he wrote online late one night. "The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav [sic]. . . . "

Shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! Raise your hand if you need to take a piss!"

Night is falling on Frankel's warehouse, and we're midway through an impromptu jam onstage. Frankel's half brother Brennan, another Nullsoft staffer, is belting out these lyrics for a song about obedience and oppression. When I joke that it sounds like it's inspired by real life, no one argues. "America Online as a company is all right," Frankel says diplomatically, "but big companies have limitations about what they can or can't do."

A few weeks after I visit, AOL proved his point once again. On December 9th, the company shut down the San Francisco office that once housed Nullsoft and Spinner, and laid off 450 employees, including Frankel's half brother. The next week, Frankel uploaded what could be his swan song as an AOL employee: Winamp, version 5.0. In the near future, he says, he's going to have a sit-down with his boss and enthusiastically return to a riskier way of life. This could include some new programs such as a free and open solution for mobile text messaging -- a kind of Gnutella spin on BlackBerry -- or some other stuff that he won't reveal. "Those are the really good ideas," he says.

In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control? For Frankel, subversion is in the eye of the beholder. "The question is," he says, "do you think people are ultimately good or bad? Do they want to do the right thing, or do they want to do what's good for them and fuck everyone else? I hope it's not the latter."

With our song done, Frankel and Brennan tweak the mix into shape. "I'll put this online," Frankel tells me, cracking a grin, "with your permission, of course.

great job Tom. We need more guys like Frankel out there in the corporate world. I love seeing someone give headachs to corporate execs.

EXCELLENT ARTICLE TOM....I agree with compmore (as usual).....
these unsung heros need to have their songs sung ....and let people know that there are a lot of people working behind the scenes to make music more accessible to the massses.

""The question is," he says, "do you think people are ultimately good or bad? Do they want to do the right thing, or do they want to do what's good for them and fuck everyone else? I hope it's not the latter."

I think people are basically honest...can you imagine what a nightmare every convenience store would be, or any WalMart would be, if everyone who went in there shoplifted at least one item?

"
By the time Frankel returned, he says, "the shit had hit the fan." The timing of Gnutella couldn't have been worse from the company's point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement.
"

I remember that day. Still makes me laugh.

AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an "unauthorized freelance project."

oops, cut off half my post...

contd.

ahaha, I love that "unauthorized freelance project". That statement probably increased the demand for the program ten fold.

Don't these companies know that their job is to deliver to the customer what they want, not try to fool them into thinking they want something that's going to maximise their profits.

Frankel is my hero.

"The question is," he says, "do you think people are ultimately good or bad? Do they want to do the right thing, or do they want to do what's good for them and fuck everyone else? I hope it's not the latter."

The people decide what is right that is the basis of a democracy/republic. If people decide something illegal is right, then that law is invalid not the people.

The people decide what is right that is the basis of a democracy/republic. If people decide something illegal is right, then that law is invalid not the people.

That statement sums it up better than any I've heard

"I think people are basically honest...can you imagine what a nightmare every convenience store would be, or any WalMart would be, if everyone who went in there shoplifted at least one item?"

Hey, are you comparing stealing to copyright infringement? : ) The difference here is that people are afraid of getting caught stealing from Walmart. On the internet people think they won't get caught and they become bold. I see people on this site all the time saying: "There are 60 million people sharing, you will never get caught."

"The people decide what is right that is the basis of a democracy/republic. If people decide something illegal is right, then that law is invalid not the people."

Conversely, people thought that slavery was right. Did that make the slavery laws valid? I don't think so.

Our government picks the laws it will abide by and those it will deliberately break. We the people can resist corporate tryranny by doing the same. They can't take even a little resistance. Feel the power. Go Frankel! Get laid off get unemployment and get rehired as a part time subcontracter and make more money than ever without the heart aches.

mroop at that time and in that society yes. When the majority of the country swung the other way and thought it was wrong in became invalid and a war had to be fought to stop it

You think the slavery laws were valid because a majority of the people supported them?! Wow. Was it also valid to exterminate the Jews and gypsies because a majority of the Germans thought it was valid? Was the genocide of the Tutis valid because it was supported by the majority Hutus?

By the way, one of the governing principles behind the US Constitution was to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority - see John Stuart Mill and Tocqueville. So your belief that if the majority believes something it is valid goes against the Constitution.

from a strickly legal standpoint. yes.

You are always arguing points of law on the file sharing issue and ignoring the moral high ground. funny you should now ignor the legal issue in favor of the moral high ground. back then the government listened to it's people. I'm not saying it was right I'm saying it was Valid in a legal sense.

So your belief that if the majority believes something it is valid goes against the Constitution.

If I'm not mistaken the constitution is based on majority rule. (except for presidential elections) we are bombarded with that all the time. The constitution was not origionally designed to protect the minorities. otherwise Slavery would've been abolished in 1776 and women and non landowners would've been allowed to vote. Each society interprets the constitution differently.

As far as the Germans go persecution of Jews by their laws was valid but dispicible. It was their law. The rest of the world didn't agree but didn't do anything until Germany started invading it's neighbors and imposed it's law over other sovergn nations. that made their laws invalid because the world (now in the majority) who was threatened by Germany, disagreed. again it took a war to do the right thing and eliminate those disgusting laws.

mroop said :
"Hey, are you comparing stealing to copyright infringement? : ) "
Answer- Nope.

mroop said:
" The difference here is that people are afraid of getting caught stealing from Walmart."

Honestly, I beg to differ. Various studies show most of the inventory loss is the result of employee theft...not customers..and I don't believe most people are dishonest...I do NOT believe that everyone is only separated from being a thief by the fear of the consequences of being caught. I believe the view that most people are dishonest, is not only jaded,but not supported by studies.

mroop said:
"By the way, one of the governing principles behind the US Constitution was to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority - see John Stuart Mill and Tocqueville. So your belief that if the majority believes something it is valid goes against the Constitution."

The framers of the constitution had slave owners as part of their midst , and they certainly did nothing to provide for the enfranchisement of women or adult blacks...and had no intention of providing voting rights for women or blacks...so, minorities were being...so, if they meant to protect the "minorities", from the tyranny of the majority, they did not count women and blacks in those who would be afforded full rights of citizens....Now, are we a representative republic as we should be, or are we a democracy...some have said a democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner....A representative democracy would in fact, protect the wishes of the majority over the wishes of the minority...There are very few of any true democracies, which are patterned after the rule by the people...rule by the majority...

Alexis de Tocqueville was from France, and came to the US long after the constitution was ratified...in 1831
(http://www.tocqueville.org/chap1.htm )

http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript975.html
"Harvey: He thought that slavery was an abomination. He was though an aristocrat a liberal, and he thought that to enslave another human being was the worst thing you could do to him, somehow even worse than killing him. He feared for the future of America. He thought that there might be a…a race war in our future between Blacks and Whites. He couldn’t think that Blacks could continue to be enslaved, but he also didn’t see how they could be freed and live with…in peace with their former masters."

and more...
"Ben: But he saw a continental nation?
Harvey: He…a continental nation with a frontier.
Ben: Expanding?
Harvey: That was expanding and pushing west…westward with a kind of avaricious energy that, uh, yeah…
Ben: And…and…and he compared it to Russia?
Harvey: And he compared it to Russia.
Ben: Favorably or unfavorably?
Harvey: Uh, quite favorably – this is his famous comparison at the end of the first volume when he says, uh, America and Russia seem to hold the promise for the future: democratic liberty or democratic tyranny. It’s surprising but he considered that he…that he considered the…the…the czar to be a kind of…or the czarist regime to be a democratic regime."

So, if the czar was a kind of democratic regime, it leaves me cold on Alexis' thoughts, even though, many think his reflections on democracy in the US is one of the best books of its kind.




http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_alexis_tocqueville.html
"Seeing that France was moving toward increasing democratization, he looked to the United States as a political model. With the pretext of wanting to study prison reforms in America, Tocqueville obtained permission to travel there in order to gain knowledge of American political development, knowledge which he hoped to use in order to influence France's political development. After his trip to America, Tocqueville visited England to study the British system of government. "

Now, John Stuart Mill is someone I love to disagree with,...albeit posthumously...
but let's read more about JSM's ideas about things like the tyranny of the majority...
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mill.html

"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulg-arly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting (3) persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant--society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it--its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism."

but, more from JSM...
"Liberty (Harm) Principle
Likely obstacles to democracy genuinely ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully ‘Free development of individuality
producing utility: exercised over any member of a civilised community is one of the leading essentials of
against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His well-being …the only unfailing and
Tyranny of the Majority own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient permanent source of improvement
Solution: restrict ability of democratic warrant.’ Qualification: applies only to members of is liberty.’ Because:
states to interfere with individual lives ‘civilised societies’ with ‘mature faculties’ .
What counts as ‘harm’? Damage to individuals’ 1) Despite their fallibility individuals
interests, but only those interests protected by are more likely to be right about what
People unfit for office individual rights. What rights we ought to have is would make them happy than anyone
encouraged to seek election decided by utility. According to Mill they should be else – more likely to care about it and
Solutions: Separation of Powers (power ‘liberal’, negative rights to non-interference with give it most attention. Thus if people
should be dispersed through the branches self, property, thought and speech."

Mill is usually best known among philosophers for his idea of "Utilitarianism"... i.e., the view that we should each act so as to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

When he was asked about the future of our 'democratic' form of
government, Benjamin Franklin responded:

"You have a Republic...if you can keep it!" -- Benjamin Franklin

As for the Americ, Republic or Democracy...check out
http://www.thelibertycommittee.org/repdem.pdf
" …[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention…intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often…oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.
! Fisher Ames, American statesman, 1805"

and this bit of unintended humor from the election of 2000...Florida Supreme Court...
"We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount
consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters….
The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her
will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must
not be exalted over the substance of this right.
! Florida Supreme Court, 2000"

and more...
"Yet 60 years later, on the cusp of the 21st century, this affirmation
that America is a republic, like the pledge itself, has fallen from favor. In its place is a
new declaration that America is, and always has been, a democracy.
Indeed, there is hardly a voice left in Congress, much less in the White House,
Republican or Democrat, who refers to our nation’s government as a republic. Even
President Bush declared that his election to the presidency was a vindication of the
integrity of “American democracy.” In doing so, the new president was simply following
suit. For several decades, America’s political leaders have been promoting the virtues
of America’s “democratic ideal” within, by shaping public policy according to the latest
opinion polls, and at the same time, exporting democracy abroad, by employing
American military power to reshape other nations’ governments to conform more closely
to “the will of the people.” Both goals stand, however, in direct contradiction to
America’s founding principles.
America Is Not A Democracy
Those who insist that the United States of America is a democracy rest their
claim on the foundational principle in the nation’s charter, the Declaration of
Independence, “[t]hat governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed.” To support this claim, they point to the preamble of
the Constitution of the United States which begins “We, the people of the United
States…do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.” Additionally,
they rely upon statements such as the one that appears in Article I, Section1 of the
Florida constitution that “[a]ll political power is inherent in the people,” a phrase that
appears in one form or another in every one of the 50 state constitutions.
Such statements do not, however, support the proposition that the civil
governments in America are democracies – quite the contrary. Read in context, all of
these statements support the proposition that America’s governments are republican in
form, not democratic.
First, although the Declaration of Independence does affirm that governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, it does not, however, declare
that governments derive their purposes from the consent of the governed. Rather the
Declaration of Independence avers that those purposes are derived from the nature of a
created order, an order in which all mankind are endowed with certain “inalienable
rights,” namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, the Declaration of
Independence concludes that governments are instituted to secure these rights, not to
enforce the will of the governed.
Second, although the Constitution of the United States does affirm that the
people ordained and established the government of the United States, they did so, not
to promote the will of the people, but to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings
of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….” Likewise, although the state constitutions
affirm that all power is inherent in the people, they did not establish state governments
to obey the will of the people, but to ensure that all individuals enjoy their pre-existing
rights of life, liberty, and property with which they have been naturally endowed."

whew!!! Code I don't have that many words in my vocabulary.

lol...me neither....I channel what Ms. Cleo would say ))

on honesty....

A lot of people, even in software sales, or who market shareware, start with , or express the belief that, most people are basically honest.

http://www.derman.com/LicensingService/Licensing-Piracy.html
"Most People are Basically Honest

Our belief, seemingly validated by experience, is that the overwhelming majority of people in Western-like cultures are basically honest (we have no meaningful experience with people in other cultures)."

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/shareware/limiting.html
"While people are, by and large, honest, they also procrastinate. "

http://www.oneworldunited.com/philosophy.html
"Most people are basically honest and making one error should not result in you loosing your account, especially without warning. "

http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/002731.cfm
"I think you need to start with the premise that most people are basically honest and chasing after the others who aren't is a lost cause."

I of course, am not omniscient, and don't know most people, nor am I privy to their inner motivations. I am 51, and have worked in a lot of jobs and dealt with a lot of people around the country, and internatonally....

I believe that most people are fundamentally honest, and though occasionally may do the occasional dishonest act, are not basically would be criminals kept from acting in a criminal fashion by the fear of getting caught...

It may be that many lawyers believe this....but I believe this is a wrongheaded view which just is not borne out by the behavior and mentation of the normal, reasonable, law abiding citizen....

Maybe I just know myself and have extrapolated that to others....don't know...

Long live internet innovators like this

.. WOW, Code!! take THAT, mroop! May I inquire which mroop are you, btw. We seem to have had some clones up in here lately.. keep posting though, mroop.. I read your post to obtain balance and your comments are read here..